Strategy

Guest Post: How Amazon Wins: Low Prices Don’t Require Bad Customer Experiences

In 2005 CustomerThink gave Amazon.com a customer-centric leadership award. In an acceptance letter, Craig Berman, Amazon’s director of platform and technology communications, said: It is simply in our DNA to approach our business by starting with the customer and working backward, and for the past ten years we have stayed laser-focused on this core principle. In the following years, Amazon.com has shown that customer-centricity is more than a slogan. The company keeps innovating to serve existing customers by expanding what it sells and how consumers access its content (e.g., Kindle). But it has also been a pioneer into new markets […]

Entrepreneurship

Networking in a Networked Economy

It is a no brainer that the ability to create and nurture a good network is critical to succeed in a networked economy and this is one area where we all can continue to improve irrespective of how good we are. It was a Sunday morning when i was alone and in a self-reflection mood. I was thinking about what i have done to cultivate my network in the past few years and was unpleasantly surprised that i have not done anything to nurture my network at all in the past 3-4 years. “What have YOU done to nurture your […]

Innovation

A Good Example of Innovation in Retail Banking – Alpha Bank

It is very well known that one the best ways to come up with new innovations is to mix and match existing interesting ideas to come up with something unique. If there was an industry that needed to come up with innovative solutions, it was the Retail banking industry.  I cant even remember when was the last time that this industry actually came up with an innovative offering from the start of the internet banking era. Now, Alpha bank in Russia has come up with a novel concept of a Fitness Account. This idea already combines two existing needs of […]

Marketing

A to Z of Personal Branding

I saw this great presentation on slide share about Personal Branding created by Barry Feldman. Everyone of us is a brand now, whether we acknowledge this or not. Just like any other brand, we need to be intentional about what the brand stands for and for whom. The two most important questions for any brand manager are the following: Who is this brand for or the target audience? What does this brand mean for the audience it is created for? Answer to these two questions lead to other attributes of the brand, like what are the attributes of the brand, […]

Ideas

40 + 15 Alternatives to College

The value that college education brings to a student has been questioned for sometime now. I had earlier written about this challenge here, here and here. The increasing amount of student debt combined with the rising unemployment rates are a testament to the fact that the conventional education system is not currently broken. In this situation, James Altucher has listed down 40 alternate ideas to a formal college education (which comes with the debt) in a slide deck that he shared on slide share. I would like to add my own list of alternatives to college education as below: Join someone […]