5 Ways to Send Productivity Through the Roof

Want to dramatically improve your employees’ performance without spending any money?

Want to dramatically improve your own performance without taking classes, attending seminars, or buying cool new gadgets that promise lots but deliver little?

It’s easier than you think. See how.

From Ox Cart to WalMart: 4 Keys To Reaching Emerging Market Consumers

To get products to customers in emerging markets, global manufacturers need strategies for navigating both the traditional and the modern retail landscapes. In emerging markets the world over, multinationals struggling to get their products to consumers confront a bewildering kaleidoscope of strategic and operational challenges. At one extreme, they must grapple with traditional retailers: the chaotic array of shops, kiosks, street vendors, and other small proprietors who seem to offer neighborhood customers a little of everything, whether it be groceries or [...]

Game On! A TV Game Show for IT and Analysts?

Imagine a game show featuring three competing teams of contestants who are given a business problem involving choices. They get one week to design and test their hypotheses through experiments and return to the show with their answers. A panel of CEOs would judge the winning team.

Why not provide analysts, and the important role they perform, more visibility to the public? Make it fun. The popular TV show “The Big Bang Theory” highlights physicists. So why not have a TV game show for analysts and IT specialists to show off their investigative and discovery skills? We might call it “The Big Data Theory!”

Grace Hopper, b.1906.First Data Scientist?

Grace Hopper, U.S. Naval Rear Admiral and the oldest active-duty officer in the U.S., was also a computer scientist who developed the first working compiler in 1952, and led the effort in the 1960s to develop COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) a programming language still in use.

However, she was also probably the world’s first data scientist.

Long-Term Nurture: You’re Doing It Wrong

*A portion of this blog post is republished with permission from SiriusDecisions, Inc. To read the full post, please visit: http://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/long-term-nurture-youre-doing-it-wrong/

In most organizations, “long-term nurture” is either a meaningless phrase, or an out. I will illustrate my point by sharing a conversation I recently overheard at a marketing event:

Finance. Turbocharged.

Only 5% of respondents say their Finance organization is delivering Game Changing Value today? What’s that about? Please visit http://www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/documents/financial-planning-and-analysis-urgent-need-new-skills-2012-october-fm-comm to receive (free) access to the October 17 presentation. A new research paper prepared by APQC and EPM Channel argues that CFOs must now double-down on their investments in finance team training and development. The sense of urgency stems from the fact that many new and middle-management finance professionals are usually proficient in the “harder” skills of analytics and number-crunching, but often lack “softer” [...]

Love Data? Now You Can Wear It

Did you think an old Tweet just goes into the internet abyss, never to be thought of again?

How wrong you are.

15th Century Big Data - What Can We Learn From It?

“Big Data” is in vogue today. It’s the new fashion in business and technology. It’s a phenomenon that is difficult to explain but somehow managed to trek from the Technology Street to Wall Street and now blazing its trails into the Main Street.

The technocrats, the data scientists and the business executives are claiming that there hasn’t been anything like this throughout the human history.

But, is this true?