In a world where products are increasingly being replaced by services, it is important to understand the role that customer service plays and how it can affect the rate of user attrition. In the XaaS universe, where everything is offered on a monthly payment basis,...
In 2010, I was attending a photography workshop in New Jersey, and one of the guest speakers said something that applies to almost any other discipline, and that has stayed with me for all these years. By the time of the workshop, this particular speaker was an...
When we see a caricature of a boat, we don’t see the portion of the hull that is submerged under water. That portion, is not wasted, it is what actually makes it float. It is worth assuming that to make things work, it takes more than what meets the eye,...
We change, and the world changes around us, but here are certain themes that remain constant. A year ago, I published this post. I still love the image of every step taken actually creating the path. A year ago, I was still in Florida. Yesterday, I was at a trail,...
I have been experimenting with ChatGPT lately, trying to find some useful application for it. In that process, I try to run some of my searches both through a search engine and also ask the bot for it. In one of my last tests, I asked ChatGPT to cite its sources, and...
To change behavior, there must be a certain degree of agency. If there is no influence in the outcome, there is no point to change. The residents of my current city are great. Rugged, hard working and mostly respectful of their fellow human beings. But when you move...
This is one of the most sound advice I have heard, when it comes to dealing with criticism. I heard it from non other than Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn. Not everybody comes from the same frame of reference, and they interpret things differently. So it...
In so many of my conversations about services delivery, I hear well smart, capable, and hard-working professionals describe how they are setup to resolve service tickets in a short time, and how they always strive to deliver the services in the way they were promised...
Some innovations that are appearing over the horizon look to most us someway weird. We go “no way”. We presume they are fads and we’ll never use them. It always have been like that. Just a few years ago, the answer that met some of these innovations went something...
You probably know what a post-mortem is, right? That’s when we failed (whatever that means), and in order to learn from it and to give it our best effort so that it never happens again, we tease out every single detail of what went wrong. Then there is the...
You may have already heard about the large amounts of energy that Bitcoin miners utilize in the process of working on the blockchain and spitting out another coin, or “mining” it. Recently, I was introduced to an ingenious way of using this for stabilizing...
We have to nourish our bodies, but since ancient times, there is something about sharing a meal that makes us more human. Most species compete for the food available, with the exception of small offspring. But we humans do something remarkable: we share. And together...
We see the world through our own experience. There is no way around it. As a photographer, one of the things I learned, is that no two photographers can ever get exactly the same image, as they will never be able to stand in the same place, at the same time. Either...
I used to think that Daylight Savings Time was just the way things were done in this country. I didn’t pause to think that there could be a different way forward. Not that I like the sun setting at 6 PM during the winter, but I always hated getting up during the...
In a time where there are some layoffs going on, I know some of our colleagues may have been affected. There is a tendency to ostracize those who are going through this ordeal, and the truth is that, in our economy, it happens cyclically with every boom and bust...
In a world where products are increasingly being replaced by services, it is important to understand the role that customer service plays and how it can affect the rate of user attrition. In the XaaS universe, where everything is offered on a monthly payment basis,...
Whenever the cost is not significant, I behave like an early adopter. That’s why I started using LinkedIn in 2002, and I continue to check out whatever tech innovation shows up that I can check out for a nominal fee, or for free. So when I was for a few days in...
If you are working on something truly innovative, and you insert the word “disruptive” multiple times in your speech when you are describing your product or service, you may have to make some compromises. It may sound obvious, but here is Uber as an...
Dogs are fantastic animals, and they give us so much. Company is one of those things. The also ground us, make us appreciate the moment, the simple things. If you take a dog for a walk, you cannot rush it, you have to stop, let it in; and only then continue. But the...
On a recent business trip, I had one setback that I have never had before. It is quite embarrassing, but after logging about 1.4M miles on just one airline, on a domestic trip, I lost my wallet. The last time I remember having it in my hands, was in seat 3C, and...
I was chatting with a Channel Partner’s sales person a few days ago. This particular gentleman has been in the business for decades, and probably have seen it all. When we started talking about co-selling with the vendor, the topic of “account...
Most days I go through a morning ritual of updating the apps on my phone. It is a rare day when there are not at least four or five apps with a new release. EVERY DAY. Granted, there are hundreds of apps on my device; and the only one at fault for this is me, for...
They are a pro. But what kind of pro? It is not about charging for what you do. There is the PROficient pro. The one that at a technical level is capable of delivering quality work. The pro that has the skills. The pro that has gone through the training, and has put...
Some of my Mobile World Congress-going friends may yawn at this one, but a few days ago, Thierry Breton, the European Internal Market and Industry Commissioner brought up again, the imbalance on how many tech giants like Google and Netflix (sometimes called...
The hardest problem, is to figure out things. Once we know how things work, we just have to go through the motions and produce an output. Much harder is when we face we the uncertain, when we don’t know exactly how things work, and figuring out things is part of...
