What Best Google's Managers Do

Lesson learned...

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." – Winston Churchill

The Art of Living...

My Pursuit of the Art of Living

Posted: 07 Oct 2013 07:00 AM PDT

By Leo Babauta

For many years I simply lived, and got by.
But in the last few years, after learning a bit about habits and mindfulness and simplicity and love, I have changed my approach to living.
Now I see living as an art form, to be studied and played with and practiced and mastered. Of course, few ever master the art of living, and I don’t know if I ever will. Probably not.
But I can pursue this art. I can appreciate it when others do it well. I can learn about it, through experiments and observation and introspection.
My pursuit of the art of living is only just beginning, but I thought I’d share a bit about this pursuit with you, my good friends.

Beginning the Pursuit

The journey begins with a single step, a wise man said, and for me that first step is simple:
Admit I don’t know.
Learning begins by emptying your cup, so that you can fill it with what you find. Emptying your cup means getting rid of pre-set opinions.
I don’t know what the art of living is, but I am curious.
And so the path is one of open hands, of curiosity and finding out.
And it’s one of bare feet, of being open and naked, willing to be exposed to life and chaos.
It’s about clear seeing, mindfulness turned to seeing reality as it is, without trying to make things rosy or conform to the story you tell yourself.
Clear seeing, naked, open hands, curious without knowing. That’s the path that I’ve found, so far.

The Art Emerges

With clear seeing, I start to see why I (and others) suffer, why we stress and get mad at each other and want more and more.
And now I can start to apply the art of living to my days.
Here’s what I practice with, imperfectly:

• Compassion. Instead of being angry or frustrated, I find the pain in others, and open my heart to them. This includes compassion for myself.
• Gratitude. Life is filled with wonder, and the people around me as well. I try to open myself to that wonder, and be grateful it’s there, instead of complaining.
• Joyfear. Joy is an awesome thing to have, but joyfear is present in the powerful moments in life where joy and fear mix, where we’re taking chances and doing something outside of our comfort zone that both excites us and makes us face the possibility of failure. I now embrace these moments rather than avoiding them.
• Not avoiding discomfort or uncertainty. When we avoid discomfort, we are limited by our comfort zone, and new learning and new ventures become impossible. When we avoid uncertainty, we only stick to what we know. But we can purposely become good at discomfort and uncertainty, by practicing in small bite-sized chunks, over and over.
• Staying with the moment, even when it’s hard. This is the hardest of all. “Living in the moment” sounds wonderful, but actually staying with the present moment isn’t ever easy. Try it: with your eyes open, sit still and stay with the sights and sounds around you for 1 minute, without your mind wandering away from them. If you don’t notice your mind wandering, either you’re an experienced mindfulness practitioner, or you didn’t notice when your mind wandered.
• Relationships are everything. Getting what we want, having things our way, having control, being right … these things matter nothing compared to relationships. Imagine being in your death bed at the age of 80 … will your sense of being right and in control comfort you when you have no good relationships, no one who has loved you? Put relationships first.
• Not holding on to expectations & judgments. Expectations and judgments prevent me from enjoying what I have, from enjoying the simple presence of someone else in my life. I practice with noticing these expectations and judgments, and practice with holding them loosely, letting them go.
• Letting go. This is the art of living in two words: letting go. It’s letting go of judgments, expectations, wanting to be right, wanting to control, fear of discomfort, fear of uncertainty, fear of failure, fear of boredom, comparing myself to others, wanting distraction, being irritated, complaining. It’s noticing when I’m holding these, and letting go. Loosening my heart’s grip on any of these, and letting go. And then letting go again. And again.

And so the art of living is a practice, one that doesn’t end, that doesn’t have a mastery level. It’s a constant letting go, a constant picking up again, and then letting go again. And falling, and getting up without beating myself up.
The art of living is the art of getting back up.

Big Secret in Life...

"The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. … There are no back doors, no free rides. There's just you, this moment and a choice."

The do-or-die questions boards should ask about technology

Board members should raise nine critical questions when discussing technology strategy with IT and business managers.

June 2013 | byPaul Willmott
Some organizations are creating new technology forums, building the expertise of corporate directors, and strengthening IT governance—all with the aim of allowing boards to guide management by asking the right questions about technology.¹ But what are the right questions at a time when digital technologies are beginning to disrupt industries and mastering these technologies may be the key to long-term survival and success?
The particulars of each enterprise’s situation will, of course, determine the focus of the discussion and the detailed questions to ask. However, across industries, every corporate director—IT savvy or not—will benefit from reviewing the following questions as a starting point for shaping a fruitful conversation with management about what the company needs to do to become a technology winner.

1. How will IT change the basis of competition in our industry?

Technology is making boundaries between industries more porous and providing opportunities for attacker models. For example, in the banking industry, online consumer-payment products such as Square—a mobile app and device that enables merchants to accept payments—are challenging traditional payment solutions. Free Mobile, a French telecommunications attacker, has captured significant market share by offering inexpensive mobile voice and data plans, in part by offloading some of its traffic onto the home Wi-Fi access points used by its broadband customers.
For incumbents in many sectors, technology is becoming an arms race. Companies are harnessing technologies such as social media and location-based services to reinvent the customer experience and capture market share.

Questions to ask:

• Who are our emerging competitors?
• How is technology helping us win against traditional and new competitors?
• How can we use technology to enter new markets?

2. What will it take to exceed our customers’ expectations in a digital world?

Customers are being educated by e-commerce leaders like Amazon and Apple to expect an ultraconvenient experience, personalized in real time. Attackers in many industries are differentiating themselves from incumbents through convenience and service. Digital finance company Wonga, for example, settles loans in 15 minutes.
As a result, customer expectations are rising quickly. Simply meeting these enhanced expectations can be a major effort for organizations that were not born digital. For instance, retailers may need to step up their development of digital channels. Banks, insurers, and telecommunications players may need to automate end-to-end sales and service processes so that customers can interact with the company in real time in an error-free digital environment. The bar is high for delighting customers in a digital world. Often, doing so requires investment in sophisticated big-data capabilities that use social, location, and other data, for example, to attract potential customers to product promotions at stores in their vicinity.

Questions to ask:

• How does our customer experience compare with that of leaders in other sectors?
• What will our customers expect in the future, and what will it take to delight them?
• Do we have clear plans for how to meet or exceed their expectations?

3. Do our business plans reflect the full potential of technology to improve our performance?

Technology expenses can be high, but they are relatively small compared with their potential to boost the operating performance of the business. Technology can improve business performance by driving revenues (for example, by using big data for cross-selling in digital channels), reducing overall costs (for instance, by automating end-to-end processes), and lowering risk costs (for example, in insurance, by using social-media data to aid risk calculations). Technology can also have a negative impact on performance (for instance, by reducing margins given increased transparency about pricing in the market).
By seizing the opportunities and mitigating the threats, companies can dramatically improve their performance. One retailer has doubled revenue growth by investing in the digital channel. A bank is targeting a 10 percent reduction of operating costs through automation of end-to-end processes. Ultimately, the strategy that emerges from an assessment of opportunities and threats should be an integrated plan that shows how the business will beat the competition using information over a multiyear horizon, not simply a revised annual IT budget. With the right agreement on the scale and scope of the opportunity and threat, the level of investment in IT becomes an outcome rather than a constraint.

Questions to ask:

• Has the P&L opportunity and threat from IT been quantified by business unit and by market?
• Will our current plans fully capture the opportunity and neutralize the threat?
• What is the time horizon of these plans, and have they been factored into future financial projections for both business and IT?

4. Is our portfolio of technology investments aligned with opportunities and threats?

The portfolio should clearly reflect the business opportunities and threats at stake. It also needs to be dynamic—executives must avoid the temptation to reuse the allocations from the previous year’s budget without a close review. Companies should balance short-term P&L opportunities (for example, upgrading digital channels), medium-term platform investments (such as customer databases), and carefully chosen longer-term bets (for instance, piloting new, digitally enabled business models).
Regular, often quarterly, portfolio rebalancing is needed, as assumptions can change quickly. Many companies, for instance, recently cut investment in the Internet channel, as customers have switched to mobile apps. The portfolio should also be managed to keep execution risk in an acceptable range. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted. These risks can be managed by monitoring the portfolio carefully and deploying effective processes that assure value will be created.²

Questions to ask:

• How well is our IT-investment portfolio aligned with business value with regard to opportunities and threats?
• How well does the portfolio balance short-term and long-term needs?
• Do we have effective value-assurance processes in place to mitigate execution risk?

5. How will IT improve our operational and strategic agility?

IT has a significant effect on operational business agility (for example, time to market for new products), as well as on strategic business agility (for instance, the ability to extract synergies from an acquired business or the ability to connect systems to a distribution partner).
Leading businesses are continually using IT to improve business agility. For example, one logistics operator has created a control room where the location and condition of assets such as rolling stock can be viewed in real time, enabling a swift response in the case of equipment failure.
Business agility is underpinned by the agility of the IT function itself—its ability to design and implement changes to systems rapidly at low cost and risk. IT agility can be increased by changing the systems landscape (for example, by reducing the number of systems), improving data quality (for instance, by creating enterprise data standards), optimizing IT delivery processes (for example, by applying lean-management techniques), and building flexibility into sourcing arrangements (for instance, by buying processing capacity on demand in the cloud).
Leading businesses measure and manage both business and IT agility, ensuring that the business can respond competitively.

Questions to ask:

• How does our business and IT agility measure up with that of our competitors?
• How do our IT plans increase our business and IT agility?
• Are our sourcing relationships increasing or reducing our agility?

6. Do we have the capabilities required to deliver value from IT?

Technology alone delivers no value. It’s the combination of a clear strategy, the right technology, high-quality data, appropriate skills, and lean processes that adds up to create value. Any weak link in this chain will lead to poor value delivery from IT.
For example, one telecommunications company introduced a new IT system to support cross-selling in stores but found that revenues didn’t increase until the quality of customer data was improved, staff were trained in how to have the right conversations with customers, and sales processes and incentives were realigned.
Leading organizations actively assess their capabilities in these dimensions and target their weak spots. One bank, for example, recently created a group data-services team to improve the quality of data across the enterprise.
In many sectors, a shortage of IT-literate talent in the business is creating a bottleneck. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of executives can, with the appropriate training, learn how to manage value from IT. But capability building must start at the top. Some companies have put their top 200 managers through IT boot camp as a way to start the process.

Questions to ask:

• Do we have the capabilities needed to drive full value from our existing IT systems?
• What are the weakest links in our capabilities?
• Do we have enough IT-literate executives?
• What is our plan for upgrading capabilities?

7. Who is accountable for IT and how do we hold them to account?

In most organizations, accountability is clear for functions such as finance and human resources. In HR, for example, performance can be tracked using a scorecard of intuitive business metrics such as attrition. But accountability for IT is not always so well-defined. So-called shadow IT functions—such as IT developers hired into the marketing department to build social-media apps—can sometimes be out of reach of the core IT function. The emergence of roles such as the chief digital officer and chief data officer can further confuse the picture. Moreover, the IT function can’t be held solely accountable for delivering value from IT. Lower process costs, for example, benefit business units and functions other than IT.
IT can also prove hard to measure. All too often, volumes of technical data are presented instead of a limited set of intuitive, business-relevant metrics. Measures of IT productivity or the bottom-line value delivered by IT are seldom available.
Leading organizations define a clear IT operating model, which determines exactly who is accountable for IT activities such as developing apps, managing data quality, or implementing IT solutions in business processes. The operating model must be aligned with business priorities. Centralized models dominate when cost or control is a priority, whereas businesses seeking growth and agility often adopt federalized IT structures. Whatever the model, IT leaders should be held accountable through scorecards that measure value delivered to the business in the form of efficiency, agility, and risk levels. Scorecards should be intuitive for even the least IT-savvy board member, and they should be aligned with executives’ incentives.

Questions to ask:

• What is our operating model for IT, and is it aligned with our business priorities?
• Who is accountable for delivering business value from IT—both overall and by activity?
• Are those accountable being measured using business-friendly scorecards that create the right incentives?

8. Are we comfortable with our level of IT risk?

Cybersecurity is a significant and growing IT issue. Every large company’s security has been breached, and most executives have a poor understanding of the risks. But cyberattacks are just one category of IT risk. A failure of a small software component can cost a company a lot of money in customer compensation. IT systems can also cause business-conduct risk—for instance, if automated recommendations to cross-sell products conflict with regulatory requirements.
Companies need a comprehensive system for managing IT risk that assesses the full range of risks (for example, hacking attacks, vendor failure, and technical failure) and addresses the root causes, which include redundant technology, incorrect policies, poor processes, and insufficient oversight.

Questions to ask:

• Do we have a comprehensive understanding of the IT risks we face?
• How is our level of IT risk measured, and is it aligned with the company’s overall risk appetite?
• How are we reducing our IT risk on an ongoing basis?
• Who is responsible for overseeing the level of IT risk?

9. Are we making the most of our technology story?

IT is already on the minds of analysts, customers, regulators, and shareholders, and interest will rise as enterprises become increasingly digital. In many industries, digital is likely to become the predominant sales channel. Companies should therefore be ready to communicate their IT strategies externally.

Questions to ask:

• What are the key messages we should communicate?
• How, when, and to whom should they be communicated?

Simplicity is actually quite complicated.

Simplicity is often equated with minimalism.
Yet true simplicity is so much more than just the absence of clutter or the removal of decoration.
It’s about offering up the right things, in the right place, right when you need them.
It’s about bringing order to complexity.
And it’s about making something that always seems to “just work.”
When you pick something up for the first time and already know how to do the things you want to do, that’s simplicity.

...reflect...

 “The whole idea is not to figure out what you should do that will matter, but to make each thing you do reflect the values you want, because we don't know what's going to matter in the future.”
— Gloria Steinem

Four Fundamental Things To Manifest Money...

Here are four fundamental things to do to manifest money using the law of attraction.

1. Think more thoughts in a day of abundance than of lack of money.
2. Be happy now, without the money.
3. Be truly grateful for everything you have now.
4. Give the best of yourself to others.

Four easy steps. You can do them if you want it enough.

The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing

Emerging technologies are poised to personalize the consumer experience radically—in real time and almost everywhere. It’s not too early to prepare.

April 2013 | byPeter Dahlström and David Edelman

Digital marketing is about to enter more challenging territory. Building on the vast increase in consumer power brought on by the digital age, marketing is headed toward being on demand—not just always “on,” but also always relevant, responsive to the consumer’s desire for marketing that cuts through the noise with pinpoint delivery.
What’s fueling on-demand marketing is the continued, symbiotic evolution of technology and consumer expectations. Already, search technologies have made product information ubiquitous; social media encourages consumers to share, compare, and rate experiences; and mobile devices add a “wherever” dimension to the digital environment. Executives encounter this empowerment daily when, for example, cable customers push for video programming on any device at any time or travelers expect a few taps on a smartphone app to deliver a full complement of airline services.
Remarkably, all this is starting to seem common and routine. Most leading marketers know how to think through customer-search needs, and optimizing search positioning has become one of the biggest media outlays. Companies have ramped up their publishing and monitoring activities on social channels, hoping to create positive media experiences customers will share. They are even “engineering” advocacy by creating easy, automatic ways for consumers to post favorable reviews or to describe their engagement with brands.
But we’re just getting started. The developments pushing marketing experiences even further include the growth of mobile connectivity, better-designed online spaces created with the powerful new HTML5 Web language, the activation of the Internet of Things in many devices through inexpensive communications tags and microtransmitters,¹ and advances in handling “big data.” Consumers may soon be able to search by image, voice, and gesture; automatically participate with others by taking pictures or making transactions; and discover new opportunities with devices that augment reality in their field of vision (think Google glasses).
As these digital capabilities multiply, consumer demands will rise in four areas:
1. Now: Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time.
2. Can I: They will want to do truly new things as disparate kinds of information (from financial accounts to data on physical activity) are deployed more effectively in ways that create value for them.
3. For me: They will expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs or used to personalize what they experience.
4. Simply: They will expect all interactions to be easy.
This article seeks to paint a picture of this new world and its implications for leaders across the enterprise. One thing is clear: the consumer’s experiences with brands and categories are set to become even more intense and defining. That matters profoundly because such experiences drive two-thirds of the decisions customers make, according to research by our colleagues; prices often drive the rest.²
It’s also apparent that each company as a whole must mobilize to deliver high-quality experiences across sales, service, product use, and marketing. Few companies can execute at this level today.³ As interactions multiply, companies will want to use techniques such as design thinking to shape consumer experiences. They also will need to be familiar with emerging tools for gathering the right data across the consumer decision journey. Finally, the marketing organization’s structure will need to be rethought as collaboration across functions and businesses becomes ever more essential.

What to expect in 2020

Over the next several years, we’re likely to see the consumer experience radically integrated across the physical and virtual environment. Most of the technologies needed to make this scenario happen are available now. One that’s gaining particular traction is near-field communication (NFC): embedded chips in phones exchange data on contact with objects that have NFC tags. The price of such tags is already as low as 15 cents, and new research could make them even cheaper, so more companies could build them into almost any device, generating a massive expansion of new interactive experiences. To understand that near future, review the infographic below and follow a hypothetical, tech-enabled consumer, Diane, who purchases an audio headset.
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/the_coming_era_of_on-demand_marketing?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1304
Taken together, the scenes from Diane’s consumer journey illustrate the four emerging areas of consumer demands we touched on above.

Now

Marketers have gotten a foretaste of the consumer’s desire for more urgency and ubiquity. Bank balances running low? Send the consumer an alert on her cell phone. A question about fees shows up on the bank’s Twitter handle? Post an immediate response. An executive of one major bank believes that the immediacy of smartphone apps has already made brick-and-mortar contact unnecessary for many young consumers, who use a range of mobile services to manage their accounts and rarely interact with the brand physically. Yet having an entire bank in your phone may be only a baseline for the experiences on the horizon. Consider one European beverage company’s beta test of beer coasters embedded with NFC technology. A club patron contemplating a new brew can tap a coaster with a cell phone and get a history of the beer, bars where it is served, upcoming promotions, and a list of friends who have given it a thumbs-up.
In this environment, a marketer’s “publishing” extends to virtualized media such as the coaster or Diane’s headphones, which become touch points for considering and evaluating products and services. Digital information technologies, operating behind the scenes to integrate data on all interactions a consumer has across the decision journey, will provide insights into the best influence pathways for companies, while also triggering new personalized experiences for consumers.

Can I

Most first-wave digital capabilities helped people access things they already did—shopping, banking, finding information. Consumers must often settle for compromises in their digital experiences. Yet robust programming, data-access, and interface possibilities now available could make every digital interaction an opportunity to deliver something exceptional.
Consider Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s new smartphone app, which changes the house-hunting experience. A prospective home buyer begins by taking a picture of a house he or she likes. Using image-recognition software and location-based technologies, the app identifies the house and provides the list price, taxes, and other information. It then connects with the buyer’s personal financial data and (with further links to lender databases) determines whether the buyer can be preapproved for a mortgage (and, if so, in what amount). This nearly instantaneous series of interactions cuts through the hassle of searching real-estate agents’ sites for houses and then connecting with the agents or with mortgage brokers for financing, which might take a week.
The mortgage app shows how the digital environment is now integrating disparate sources of information, at low cost and at scale, for many new domains. The challenge for companies is to look beyond today’s interfaces and interactions and to see that moving past compromises will require a rethinking of aspects of packaging, pricing, delivery, and products.

For me

Some online marketers already use features in devices such as cameras and touch screens to help consumers see what apparel and accessories may actually look like when worn. Web retailer Warby Parker, for example, offers hundreds of customized views of eyeglasses overlaid on a Webcam picture of the consumer.
In the future, demands for more personalized experiences will intensify. A phone tap, a click, or a stylus jot will instantly personalize offers, using information captured on “likes,” recent travel, income, what friends are doing or like, and much more. With each interaction, the consumer will be creating new data footprints and streams that complement existing digital portraits, sharpening their potential impact. Facebook will eventually be able to mine the world’s largest database of photographs, linking individual people to their activities. Smartphones have rich data on every place where you have traveled with one in your pocket. This is just a start, and the privacy, security, and general trust implications are staggering. Yet consumers consistently show a desire to provide more data when companies use captured information to provide truly helpful feedback (you’re over budget or you are doing well in your exercise program) or to offer recommendations, services, and customization tools rather than just push what might appear to be intrusive (and creepy) messaging.

Simply

The quest for simplicity led Amazon to create a subscriber model for delivering bulky repeat-buy items (such as diapers) and Starbucks to adopt a tap-and-go approach to mobile payments. Yet many interactions remain complex and fragmented: to name just a few, finding, organizing, and redeeming online coupons; turning weekly meal plans into online delivery orders; tracking your monthly cash flow; and staying on top of your health-insurance bills and reimbursements.
Evolving technologies and consumer behavior should make it easier to redesign many complex experiences. For example, companies offering inherently complicated products or services could overlay a game interface on certain Web pages, to let consumers play at trading off different options and prices. Visual-recognition technology could allow you to scan health-care bills, receipts, statements, and appointments into one integrated calendar and cash-management system. Already, start-ups in travel, expense, and sales-force management are experimenting with approaches that streamline processes and make interactions more inviting—using touch and swipe to make changes, gestures to activate large displays, and data in phones to recognize consumers and automatically customize interfaces.

Setting strategies and building capabilities

Consumers will soon make these demands of every interaction they have with companies. Although the marketing function may often be the best conduit to get customer input and to drive decisions about how to distinguish brands, coordinated efforts across the enterprise will be needed on three levels.

Designing interactions across the consumer decision journey

Today, many companies have successfully defined and addressed customer interactions across a few channels. What they need to be designing, however, is the entire story of how individuals encounter a brand and the steps they take to evaluate, purchase, and relate to it across the decision journey. Marketing or customer research can’t do this alone. At one apparel retailer, managers from multiple functions go together into the field to do deep ethnographic research— watching how customers shop, going into their homes, and uncovering the triggers and motivations that drive behavior. These managers look for the compromises that people face as they try to get things done, probing for their higher aspirations. And the managers watch how customers react as they interact with brands.
Among the findings, the managers identified seven key “use cases”—customer situations that lead to satisfaction along different decision journeys. They found a wide range of trigger points for choosing an “outfit solution” for a social occasion, learning that shoppers became frustrated, especially online, when they couldn’t see how items would look together. Customers wanted to drag and drop items on an on-screen model or to see great combinations in advance. But that required different merchants to work collectively and the stores to bring items together on sales floors.
Cross-functional teams also came together in workshops. With third parties such as fashion bloggers and thought leaders from online-media companies, they mapped out new ways to influence the decision journeys of customers with different attitudes toward the retailer’s brand or different kinds of spending behavior. One of the most valuable outcomes was clarity on how the store’s brand positioning could guide the design of new experiences. The teams knew that their story would always be “better value than the shopper expected, delivered in a friendly way.” That meant warm visuals and messaging on the company’s Web site and across various media to reinforce the story of value to the customer. And the teams explored new ways social media could help customers show off the value they received.
Out of the work came not only a shared, company-wide sense of the decision journeys of consumers but also immediate buy-in to a wide range of initiatives that could boost market share. These initiatives are on track to provide an 8 percent sales lift above what the existing plan envisioned and were implemented more quickly because of the management team’s shared sense of engagement.

Making data and discovery a nonstop cycle

To win over on-demand customers, you must know them, what they expect, and what works with them, and then have the ability to reach them with the right kind of interaction. Data lie at the heart of efforts to build that understanding—data to define and contextualize trends, data to measure the effectiveness of activities and investments at key points in the consumer decision journey, and data to understand how and why individuals move along those journeys. To realize that potential, companies need three distinct data lenses.
Telescope. A clear view of the broad trends in your market, category, and brand is essential. Digital sources that track what people are looking for (search), what people are saying (social monitoring), and what people are doing (tracking online, mobile, and in-store activities) represent rivers of input providing constant warning signs of trouble or signals of latent opportunity. Many companies are drowning in reports from vendors providing these types of information tools, yet few have much clarity on which things they need to look for and who needs to know what.
One packaged-goods company got a jump on competitors when it saw a spike in online conversations about the lack of natural ingredients in shampoos and then recognized a corresponding rise in search inquiries on the subject. A new line of natural hair care products, launched at record-breaking speed, has become a successful early mover in a growing segment. A telecommunications company has become similarly plugged in: it now has a war room to track every online comment anywhere. Besides being better able to address—in an open, friendly, and fast way—problems that could escalate, it now has a great frontline source of line-outage signals that trigger repair crews and increases in call-center capacity.
Binoculars. Against this backdrop of market activity, few companies have a complete, integrated picture of where they spend their money, which interactions actually happen, and what their outcomes are. Most direct-sales companies (retailers, banks, travel services) measure the performance of their spending through isolated last-attribution analyses that look narrowly at what consumers do after confronting a search link, an e-mail, or an advertisement. Branded-goods companies try to throw all of their media spending together into an econometric model assessing the effects of their media mix. In the world of on-demand marketing, where multiple interactions take place along multiple journeys, last-action attribution explains only part of the impact of media spending, and media-mix models fail to account for touches and costs outside of paid channels.
What’s next? Deploying tools that rapidly assemble databases of every customer contact with a brand, companies will need to push every customer-facing function to work together and form an integrated view of consumer decision journeys. With longitudinal pictures of customers’ touches and their outcomes, companies can model total costs per action, find the most effective decision-journey patterns, and spot points of leakage. As more contacts become digitized—and they will—the data will gradually get easier to create. Getting a head start can help companies build ongoing test labs where they tune the ability to create and analyze the right data and immediately learn where to add investments. One bank has already realized millions of dollars in added value from the knowledge that weak points in the customer on-boarding process were undermining major marketing programs. Only when branches, call centers, and marketing worked together could the bank find the right fixes, improve customer satisfaction, and raise marketing’s return on investment.
Microscope. Trust is essential, and personalization can show customers they matter. They expect a brand to be a good steward and user of data about them and, increasingly, have high expectations for what a brand should know. In the example described earlier, data about Diane powers the brand’s ability to make it easy for her to share photographs, to buy a headset, to set up and manage a free Spotify subscription, to receive information about a local event, to be recognized at it, and to get additional special offers. Information about Diane is the thread that keeps all of her brand interactions immediate (now), valuable (can I), relevant (for me), and easy (simply).
Yet given the laser focus on getting programs into the market to improve performance, few marketers (or even line executives) have stepped back and pulled their teams together to work through the scenarios and customer-data models they will now need to build. Even fewer have a strong sense of what the current plans of the company’s IT department will deliver in which time frame. One company that addressed these issues has identified over 20 types of consumer decision journeys as archetypes of experiences it must support over the next three years. From those decision journeys, it has derived a core set of information capabilities it will need to build and is well down a tight road map of development that has already enabled it to launch products in breakthrough ways.

Delivering with new skills and processes

To deliver these new experiences, executive teams must rethink the role and structure of the marketing organization and how it engages with other functions. The changes are likely to cut deeply, transforming the way companies manage campaigns and communities, measure performance, provide customer support, and interact with outside agencies. It’s still early days, but consider the breadth of recent efforts.
Raising a consumer-packaged-goods company’s digital game. A European CPG company started by creating a digital-analytics group with worldwide operations. Rather than sprinkle digital experts across the globe, the company developed a unified structure with common standards for roles, common training, and digital career tracks to build an arsenal of future talent. The analytics team is part of a broader digital center of excellence that provides service support to the business units and drives major upgrades in IT capabilities. Defined commitments from managers in finance, legal, and HR help the center deal with challenges that arise as it seeks to offer customers a richer digital experience.
The company also reviewed all of its e-commerce trade accounts and decided that it needed a much more granular approach to serving customers. Says one executive, “It is not just an issue of managing our relationship with pure-play e-commerce sellers versus our traditional channels; it also is an issue of managing the online versus brick-and-mortar sides of the same traditional partner.” A new e-commerce trade team with added digital-analytic support is helping both to enhance the online-merchandising mix and to improve the placement of the company’s products in the search engines of e-commerce providers.
Finally, marketing leaders established a novel customer-relationship-management (CRM) team because they realized that the growth of the company’s mobile services, coupon programs, sampling, and social communities was finally enabling it to gather huge amounts of direct data about how people interacted with its brands. (That information had previously been available only to retailers.) These structural and talent changes led the company to realize that it needed to reshuffle its agency relationships, replacing a single brand-and-ad agency with two agencies—one for brand programs, the other for digital and CRM direct marketing. The company also brought more media and digital analytics in-house.
Reorienting a bank. At one institution, a new understanding of emerging brand challenges led to a radical change in the status of the CMO. Marketing had earlier ranked low in this sales-driven organization, where the function’s leaders focused mostly on corporate communications and brand campaigns. Now, a new CMO, much closer to her peers on the executive board, has been charged with directing the full consumer experience.
Each month, the bank’s business-unit leaders gather to talk about their progress in improving different consumer decision journeys. As new products and campaigns are launched, these executives place a laminated card of such a journey at the center of a conference-room table. They discuss assumptions across the whole flow of the journey for different consumer segments and how various groups across functions should contribute to the campaign. Where should customer data be captured and reused later? How will the campaign flow from mass media to social media and to the bank’s Web site? What is the follow-up experience once a customer sets up an account?
The bank has created a corporate center of excellence for digital marketing to give the strategy a forward tilt and to plan for needed capabilities. It has also appointed a new team of full-time executives who focus on mobile and social technologies—executives who have become evangelists, helping business units to raise their digital game along a range of consumer interactions. The first wave of fixes and new programs has already generated tens of millions of dollars in the first six months, and the bank expects these efforts to add more than $100 million to its annual margins.
The forces enabling consumers to expect fulfillment on demand are unstoppable. Across the entire consumer decision journey, every touch is a brand experience, and those touches just keep multiplying in number. To mobilize for the on-demand challenges ahead, companies must:

• bring managers together from across the business to understand consumers’ decision journeys, to speculate about where they may lead, and to design experiences that will meet the consumer’s demands (Now, Can I, For me, and Simply)
• align the executive team around an explicit end-to-end data strategy across trends, performance, and people
• challenge the delivery processes behind every touch point—are the processes making the best use of your data and interaction opportunities and are they appropriately tailored to the speed required and to expectations about your brand?

Executive recruiters tell us that corporate boards are looking for more people who can challenge and improve a company’s approach to social media, big data, and the customer experience. Staying ahead of the design, data, and delivery requirements of on-demand customers is much more than a marketing issue—it will be a crucial basis for future competitive advantage.

shooo away the negative emotions.... :P)

"Negative emotions are like unwelcome guests. Just because they show up on our doorsteps doesn't mean they have a right to stay." - Deepak Chopra

[POM aka peace of mind]

"If, amidst the turmoil, you can find just one moment of peace in each day, then your whole life will become more joyful. Like the water in a lake, when your mind is calm, you can see the depths below."

—  Ed and Deb Shapiro

[@happiness]

Every human being on the planet wants to be happy. Anything that anyone desires is because they think their desire will make them happy. Whether it is health, money, a loving relationship, material things, accomplishments, a job, or anything at all, the desire for happiness is the bottom line of all of them. But remember that happiness is a state inside of us, and something on the outside can only bring fleeting happiness, because material things are impermanent.

Permanent happiness comes from you choosing to be permanently happy. When you choose happiness, then you attract all the happy things as well. The happy things are the icing on the cake, but the cake is happiness.

Dear 520530!!!

How should i describe you,

You are sweet, soft & kind,

Looking at the bear reminds me of you,

The reason the bear is there to remind,

You've always been caring & thoughtful,

Being the middle child that provides care,

But at times you are lazy & restful,

I just need to learn to bear,

We do have our indifferences,

That's because we are unique being,

We are here not to eliminate but to compliment the differences,

By all our sincerity & goodness doing,

Please forgive me caused I do have my flaws,

As I could be spoiled at times,

Feeling terribly awful after each brawl,

Promised that i'll change & improve through time,

We've been together for 3 years now,

Learning, caring & loving every single day,

Seeing each other slowly aged & grow,

Hopefully we'll be there for each other till our last day,

It's been a great year 2012, 

Full with excitement, up & downs,

As we welcome year 2013,

Hoping for better, loving & couply owns,

Thank you my loving cute dear!!! Here is a short poems to show my little appreciation & hope it'll bring more smiles & happiness into your daily life! Be happy always!!! 

-I LOVE U-

iphone5 - Legacy or Legend...

Iphone5, iphone5…

Your form factor is nice and slim,

You brought me much hope of new design,

But lately you’ve been behaving wild and crazy,

I’m slowly losing my fate on your reign,

Once known as the godfather of smart phone,

Now you are nobody but a pain in my a**,

Do something or you’ll be forgotten like the gramophone,

I’m losing my patient now and may give you a pass,

Orh iphone5, iphone5…

Supposed to be the next killer phone,

But now I foresee you could just be another legend,

As you may just lost in the battlefield of smart phone,

Even there are FB pictures of you that is easily bend,

I dare not foresee your future but it’s not bright,

Unless something is done or you’ll vanish,

Like the old famous nokia in bright daylight,

Please change and improve or you’ll banish!!!

"Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."—  Steve Jobs

Love...

"Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away."
—  Elbert Hubbard

be master of your own life...

"Act as a master of your life by putting your health, well-being and happiness first."

—  Marianna Olszewski

transformation...

"Transformation happens when you dare to be awakened to greater heights. When you stay open no matter what. Letting each experience, especially the tough ones, strengthen you and add depth and wisdom."

—  Oprah

What DRIVES & GIVES ME ENERGY everyday?!?!?

1) Talking & Sharing thoughts and ideas with people of the same wavelength (Especially with those closed ones having those sincere and honest conversation... and topics that touches on human positivity & motivational talks...)

2) Playing my favourite sports - BADMINTON!!! (It keeps me going and moving forward... Somehow without badminton for 1 whole week, I will feel restless and lack of drive and sleepy...)

3) I need to hype myself up constantly... (Yup I'm a hyper person so it only makes sense that I keep it that way...)

4) Staring at the monitor whole day and not talking to anyone is just not my thing... (All monitor and no talking, makes eddy a very very dull boy...)

5) I like to engage myself with challenging thoughts and conversations as it keeps me engaged and going forward... (Without which, I feel the lack of drive of energy and slowly I will start to feel boring and un-appreciated...)

6) I LIKE TO EAT especially my favourite food like: Wan Tan Mee, Klang Famous Nasi Lemak, Dim Sum, Chee Cheong Fun, Bo Bo Cha, Ba Zhang... (No one can say no to FOOD since it's such a sinful yet satisfying affair... It's food that keeps me going and alive... not to mention my widening of my waist too... :P))

7) I NEED AT LEAST 6-7 Hours of sleep each day... (SLEEP is important to me... to keep me balance and not overly influenced by the negative energy and avoid feeling frustrated easily...and of course to avoid the anger that caused by it...)

8) I feel that to keep myself sane and active at work, off and on, I need to crack some jokes and have some fun while at work... (Gotta have some fun!!!)

letting go...

"Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness."

—  Thich Nhat Hanh