Every year, for the past four, I travel down to Cali, Colombia to talk about “service innovation.” I spend a week with a group of young managers from places like Colgate-Palmolive and Cadbury Schweppes, exploring the anatomy of great service experiences. How do The Four Seasons, Starbucks and Apple Stores engineer unparalleled experience? What frustrates […]

During my recent seminar on “influencing” for 240 managers and entrepreneurs in South America, one issue participants shared with me was the “leadership vacuum.” Local executives, who reach seniority, want to leave Venezuela because of the difficulty of doing business there, and outsiders resist being posted in the country for the same reason. As a […]

As oil continues to fill the waters off my wife’s home state, Louisiana, inventors around the world are surely scheming up new technologies to prevent such catastrophes from happening again. While I wish for their success and am thankful for their efforts, history says their energy would be better spent engineering a different kind of […]

Earlier in the week I started reviewing the insurance giant Aflac. In 2004 we start to see the growth rates of Aflac suddenly starting to climb and a new radical idea was starting to pay off for Aflac: the duck. Over 2003 and 2004, Aflac started to enjoy the fruits of an uncommon bet it […]

Pre-1992, even loyal customers struggled to recall the insurance company’s name—the “American Family Life Assurance Company.” But today, customer and non-customers alike, indeed anyone in the United States. or Japan who watches television, cannot take a summer stroll past a park pond without thinking “Aflac.” How did a small, family-owned, run-of-the-mill insurance company from Georgia […]

Learn to Use Reverse Innovation I kept my eyes on the blurring, chaotic stream of Mumbai traffic, looking for the famed “Tata Nano”—the cheapest car in the world. To be honest, I don’t think I saw one, but then again, I’m not sure I would recognize it crammed between moto-rickshaws and the tiny black Soviet-era-looking […]

Last week’s one-day stock market plunge nearly ruined our kitchen. We are remodeling our house and planned to sell stock to cover the cost of kitchen cabinets, but when we called our broker to initiate the trade we learned our shares had dropped 20% in just a few hours! We knew something strange was happening—the […]

Picking the right scale for your mission is an art. Define your purpose too narrowly and soon run out of aspirations to fill. Set your sights too high and you risk de-motivating your people. To illustrate this concept, I want to examine two seemingly similar companies: inVentiv Health (VTIV) and PDI Inc. (PDII). In 2002 […]

Their unprecedented winning streak was about to end. After 77 wins, the most by any women’s college basketball team, the women of the University of Connecticut Huskies walked off the court with a 20-12 deficit against Stanford at half time. It seemed clear the Huskies had lost their mojo. How would your organization respond to […]