Never have we lived such an exciting and tumultuous period as the current times are. The society's transformation, driven by digitalization and globalization, as well as geopolitical and economic forces, is completely transforming many industries and its clients' consumer habits.
One of these is the mass market and distribution industry. The distribution's brand, the crisis, new lifestyles, technology, Internet, etc., are obligating the entire industry to undergo transformation.
There is no correlation between innovation spending and business performance. That is the main finding of the Innovation 1000 studies on the world's top 1,000 listed companies. Curiously, company size and investment in R&D don't automatically add up to an innovative company. There are other qualities that set truly innovative companies apart. Successful business projects often start with someone having a great idea, but not all great ideas come to fruition.
There is no doubt that business intelligence – or analytics, as it is called nowadays – offers a very important strategic lever at this moment in time when the information revolution and digitization are in full swing.
This is the year of generational changes in Spain: first the king, then Botín, and this week Dimas at El Corte Inglés. It's certainly going to be very exciting seeing how these three great institutions tackle the issue of modernization and adapting to new consumers/citizens.
A peer-to-peer (P2P) or point-to-point network is a computer network in which all or some of its components run without clients or fixed servers over a series of nodes that behave equally among each other. In other words, they act simultaneously as clients and servers with regard to all the other nodes in the network. P2P networks allow the direct exchange of information in any format between interconnected computers.
The prime of the information age will coincide with the dawn of the robot age. But that doesn't mean we're about to see a world where human beings and androids walk down the streets together, like in the movies and animated cartoons. On the contrary: information technology and robotics will blend and integrate gradually to become a natural part of our daily lives.
Freemium is a business model that works by providing free basic services while charging for more advanced or special features. The term freemium is a contraction of the two words that define this business model: “free” and “premium”. This business model has gained in popularity among companies operating in Web 2.0.
There are several freemium business models, including:
This week, as a member of the teaching staff of one the most important academic institutions in Spain, I started an in-house course on customer orientation for one of the country's leading companies. On the positive side, the senior management decision at this great company to become "customer-oriented" and cast aside not only the obsession with product positioning but also the short-term view of earnings.
With many strategic plans behind me, I have always been very frustrated by the lack of connection that sometimes exists in companies between the mission and the strategy. Moreover, at times the mission can be so philosophical and spurious that hardly anyone knows about it, or it's simply a chart on a wall. But in management by missions (MbM), the mission is at the core of the strategy and everything revolves around more than three-year earnings.
Every time I give a talk about sales excellence, there's one question that nearly always come up: Are great salespeople born or made? The truth is, that it's a very difficult question to answer. The rare stars I usually meet in my projects tend to have a mixture of both things: they've been born with a natural "gift" for personal relationships and may even have an innate sales intuition or sixth sense, but they've also deliberately honed these qualities. If you asked me to choose, I'd pick the made salesperson rather than the born one.
There is no doubt whatsoever that we are living in the information age. Connectivity and the Internet of Things have made it possible to access "tons" of data. And to store all of that information, we now have Big Data. "Big Data" is a reference to the systems that manipulate large data sets. The most common difficulties encountered in these cases are related to capturing, storing, searching, sharing, analyzing and viewing.
