On the final evening of its first week open to the public, the Amazon Go store still drew lines of eager customers. The lines were staffed by employees in orange parkas, who cheerfully engaged with shoppers and handed out high-quality, reusable bags. And the wait was short: no more than five minutes in the Seattle drizzle.
Your project failed. Now what?
Failing once in a while is a good sign. While failure can certainly come from inattention or poor decision-making, it often is associated with experimentation and innovation. No one seeks out the sting of a failure and its repercussions, but smart professionals embrace failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Digital goes horizontal: challenges in the cultural sector
As educational and cultural institutions fight for relevance in an attention economy against a backdrop of an increasingly distrustful environment, taking digital horizontal is a C-suite imperative.
Do these five things to become a better mentee
“Work with a mentor” is right up there with “maximize your 401K contributions” and “no more than one drink at the office holiday party” on the list of common advice given to young professionals at the beginning of their careers. Harder to find are answers to questions such as, What is the best way to build a mentor relationship? How can you make the most of your interactions? And how can you sustain a meaningful connection over time?
The hardest problem in digital transformation
The real challenge is creating sustained cultural change: assembling and leading the right teams with the right mindset that work to build bridges within and beyond and organization, to implement successful transformative rather than incremental programs, and to disseminate learning and practice across the enterprise. In the end, it’s all about culture.
Friday 5 — 4.28.2017
An IDEO team combined human design talent and machine learning to create Font Map, a tool for designers to compare and find similar fonts. This started with Google’s ~750 typefaces, but can scale to many more. Explore for yourself. More and more of my searches start and end in the Google ecosystem, including those short snippets results in …
Friday 5 — 4.21.2017
No one needs the embarrassment of a notification popping up at the wrong time — or on the wrong device. Wired explains how to find out where you’re signed into iMessage, set up two-factor, and turn off messaging where needed. Bloomberg’s new Lens app provides a handy overlay of contextual information about people and companies. You …
Friday 5 — 4.14.2017
Facebook’s AI assistant, M, is now rolling out in Messenger with features like sticker, polls, and payment. While some are underwhelmed, others see this start with a limited number of functions as a step to broader AI capabilities. Poor usability affects everyone, but it disadvantages older adults in particular. This excerpt from a new book offers guidelines …
Friday 5 — 4.7.2017
YouTube TV has launched in select U.S. cities. Despite a relatively slim initial offering, the mobile-first sensibility and shared accounts seem designed to on-board millennials, and a way for the platform to build relationships with — and gather data on — its massive user base. In a world of specious and incomprehensible data visualization, this article pinpoints …
Friday 5 — 3.24.2017
YouTube has released an AI-powered emotion engine that helps video creators, aka influencers, understand which elements are most and least effective. YouFirst shows the video to a segment of the creator’s audience, uses facial recognition to identify the “power moments” that resonate, and can even tell you which groups of people enjoyed different parts of the content. Anyone remember when building …