Business Model, Ideas

Education Unleashed: Now It’s All Up To You

Education Unleashed: Now It’s All Up To You. Very interesting and informative piece, put together by John Mayerhofer, Vice President, Innovation, SAP. Notes section has a lot of information on all the resources currently available for anyone who wants to learn (anything). I have taken a course on Coursera and can talk by experience that this is a great tool for continuous education for anyone with an internet connection and a will to learn. In my opinion, education as a sector is ripe for complete disruption and online education offerings will play a big part in this disruption. The current education […]

Customer Engagement

Great use of Social Media

Japanese car maker Nissan wanted to showcase the benefits of electric cars and promote its award winning electric car – Nissan Leaf, in the UK. Their approach was fresh, engaging & effective. Nissan used Twitter to engage with its target audience. Nissan enlisted a series of Leaf cars as taxis and offered a free ride to anyone who tweeted their destination on twitter along with the hashtag #6XCHEAPER. Authors & content marketers have been using the ‘pay-by-tweet’ option for sometime now with moderate success. The combination of online engagement with offline engagement proved to be a clincher for its customers. […]

Ideas, Leadership

Leadership crisis

While reading the newspaper today, I realised that we are living in a world with a leadership crisis. Whether it is lack of strong political leadership or strong leadership in the corporate world. Is this because the current set of leaders never wanted to step down or nurture the next set of leaders? Or is this because we are living in a time of rapid change and the current crop of leaders don’t understand the dynamics of the change and are at a loss on how to navigate the change? Or is it because we, the common men know way […]

Customer Engagement

Why Dan Pink’s radical prescription for sales could be misleading

In his blog on HBR, best selling author Dan Pink argues that paying commissions to sales people has  a counter-intuitive effect of undermining enterprise profitability. You can read his post @ http://hbr.org/2012/07/a-radical-prescription-for-sales/ar/1. I would agree with him on most of his arguments. However, as with most theories, this theory has its limitations as well. In my opinion, sales commissions work if the following conditions are true: The sales process is simple and involves only the sales person with no dependencies on any other colleague. There is no upper limit on the commissions that he/she can receive. Earnings via commissions (as a […]

Customer Engagement, Ideas

Step by step guide for success with social media

In the past week, I have now met three people who head marketing functions for their organizations and all three have complained about how their foray into social media has received such a lukewarm response. They all indicated that they are not sure if this is something they should continue to support or just let it die their natural death. They were not the only one’s who were finding it difficult to sustain the initial rush of getting on to social media. So, clearly there is a need for a detailed framework or a step-by-step guide which organizations can use […]