Archive for: January, 2017

American English: one language, many differences

EVERYONE KNOWS that Americans don’t exactly agree on pronunciations. Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect. Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualisations of a linguistic survey that looked at...

Does vision ever take a day off? The importance of share values and vision

Does vision within an organization need to be tempered, does the role of vision ever stop or slow? Does forever need to reach into the future and push the envelope out of the current state? I believe continued, ever-expanding vision is critical if an organization is to create sustainable growth. To understand the...

Speaking the right language? The importance of customer profiling

An important part of great marketing is speaking the right language! [caption id="attachment_4103" align="alignright" width="300"] America tongue language open mouth. Studio shot.[/caption] If you know who you are trying to reach with your sales and marketing messages, the next step is to figure out what language they speak. No,  not...

What are your New Year’s resolutions?

Do you make New Year’s resolutions? It’s a long tradition that doesn't’ seem to be losing steam.  Here are the top-10 New Year's resolutions from a recent survey of 2,000 people conducted for Inc. magazine: Diet or eat healthier (71%) Exercise more (65%) Lose weight (54%) Save more and spend...

Secret Spy? Conducting Competitor Research

It’s not difficult to find the opposite of customer-centricity. I found it while traveling in eastern Europe late last year, where many businesses still—after 50 years of official communism followed by 25 years of capitalism—haven’t discovered the value and competitive advantage of good customer relations. But you don’t have to...