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.
HUBweek moments
HUBweek 2015 is a wrap. 46,000 people took part in this weeklong celebration of the work and impact at the intersection of art, science, and technology in Greater Boston. The festival was co-founded by Harvard, MIT, MGH, and the Boston Globe, and benefited from creative collaborators from dozens of institutions across the region. A few of my …
How Budweiser won the Nobel Prize in chemistry
It’s easy to spot the difference between an organization with digital DNA and an organization still making the transition. Here’s an example highlighting different approaches to breaking news. On Monday morning the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced. The Wall Street Journal was pushing the story via multiple Twitter accounts. So I clicked on one …
6 ways to create findable, useful website content
Search engine optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and increasingly, paid social media placement can achieve remarkable results. Using smart keywords and accessing segmented, up-to-date user data troves like Facebook’s can produce the kinds of attention that drive revenue, and occasionally even “go viral”. But sometimes these tools lead people to believe they can omit the first, essential step: creating …
Here’s why Google indexing tweets matters
This week I was looking for an article about the pressures of media coverage on scientific research to send to a few colleagues. All I could remember was that it was in the New York Times recently, and had the words “perils” and “publishing” in the title. So I searched within Google News for “perils publishing science nytimes” …
The institutional odyssey
Exploring best practices — and unanswered questions — as we navigate social conversation in today’s digital organization Back in the mid-90s, establishing an institutional web presence began with writing a million dollar check to Oracle. As a next step, you hired a fleet of technical employees, one of whom was called a “Webmaster”—schooled in the …