If there’s anything the last decade has taught us—and the Covid-19 pandemic has punctuated in grand fashion—it’s that businesses must get digital or they may become invisible.

Chickens come home to roost, and canaries meet their demise in coal mines. But hey, we knew there was a high probability of each happening eventually, right? However, when a black swan shows up with severe impact and consequences, everyone is caught off guard.

It all started when we drove up to the speaker menu at a quick-service restaurant. “Can I take your order?” the attendant coldly barked.

Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, Rahm Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor, famously quipped that you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.

The ISO 9001 standard talks about the relationship between the company and the customer in a couple of places. First is management’s responsibility to make sure that customers’ needs are a top consideration, and that their requirements are met.

As customer demands for more customization and choice increase, the complexity of products and associated product design, manufacturing, and sales processes also increase.

Any association would love a member-retention rate of 75 percent.

Getting your product into customers’ hands is often an undervalued—and under-engineered—part of your organization’s value chain.

Some are calling it, “The Great Resignation.” Others are calling it “

Consumers who see a product on sale being virtually touched are more engaged and willing to pay more than if the item is displayed on its own, according to a recent research paper I co-authore