For as long as I can remember, I’ve made sense of the world through analogies. When I’m in command of a topic, I often use an analogy to lower barriers to understanding (e.g., “Does your brand have a brain?”). When I’m the one searching for a cognitive on-ramp to a dialogue (GPU-accelerated databases, anyone?), I’ll wade into the water with an analogy to start to test my understanding.
Read MoreNearly one year on into the global pandemic, it has become an eye-rolling meme to complete the Mad Lib of “COVID has acted as an accelerant to .” And while society hopes for the broad, quick, and safe administration of vaccinations that help end the extended isolation and danger to which many have been exposed, certain trends accelerated or induced by the pandemic will continue their course. One of these trends, contained within the larger theme of the Future of Work, is the hybrid (i.e., non-single place of work) model that represents the path forward for most knowledge workers.
Read More2021 has arrived, and though COVID vaccines are on their way, it’s an open secret by now that we can’t instantly inoculate ourselves from the rigors and realities of 2020. And while it’s (still) too soon to know precisely what long-term effect the pandemic will have on marketing mix and spend, McKinsey’s Q4 2020 research indicates that the digitization of customer interactions has been accelerated by at least 3 years in major world markets, and that the volume of remote work accelerated over 40x faster than was anticipated under pre-crisis assumptions.
Read MoreObservers of the brand world took note this week of the launch of General Motors’ new logo. Those observers quickly turned to critics, whether they occupied posts as auto enthusiasts (“watered down,” “weak,” mediocre”), tech denizens (“criiiiiinge”), or business journalists (“branding fail”). And there’s a lot to dislike. It draws on every cliché in the modern visual identity playbook without paying off on a single one of them – it’s set in a lower-case typeface, but still manages to look hopelessly out-of-date; its gradient is striking, but merely mimics Qualtrics’ color scheme; and the white space in the “m” is supposed to give us the image of a plug to signal the shape of an electrical plug – a feature that likely will need to be pointed out rather than celebrated for standing out (i.e., they didn’t pull off a FedEx).
Read MoreLast month at Qualtrics, we launched the Breakthrough Builders podcast, shining a light on people whose ideas and efforts are behind the world’s most amazing products, brands, and experiences. I was intentional about making sure that our First Five guests embodied the kind of leader we want to profile on the show: accomplished yet humble, deeply expert yet always learning, intellectual yet personable.
Five guests, five takeaways. Here are the lessons I learned from this first series of conversations about how to make progress toward becoming a breakthrough builder.
Read MoreThere is nothing uniquely human about empathy. Every species of fauna has it, displays it, and benefits from it. If anything is unique about the human variant of empathy, it is the degree to which we have become comfortable forsaking it for simplicity and convenience.
In the summer of 2018, while a Partner at Prophet, I met Zig Serafin, the President of Qualtrics. Zig had come to the company a few years prior after a successful 17 years at Microsoft, and I wanted to know what compelled him to join. So I asked him. His eight-word answer – “we’re building the feedback loop for the world” was spoken with excitement, conviction, and a faint dose of incredulity. Where else, Zig posited, could one be doing such important work, given the gap between how people want to experience the world and they way that they do experience it?
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