Strategic Planning for the New Year

As the end of the year approaches, it is the perfect time to take a step back, evaluate the past year, and look to the future.

There are a myriad of ways that companies take on strategic planning, while others just ignore it (yikes!).

The important thing is that it is done and everyone in the organization understands where they are going, what’s expected in 2019, and how they will get there.

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Case Study: Running a Design Sprint for a Salesforce Implementation

On a recent, hot Monday morning in Texas, I showed up at the headquarters of Volusion, a leading e-commerce platform for small businesses. A while earlier, Volusion had reached out to me to with an interesting proposition: facilitate a Design Sprint for an implementation of the Salesforce Service Cloud — with a long-term goal of delivering a new customer experience platform for the entire organization.

One of the great benefits of Salesforce is its flexibility to be customized to the organization’s needs, but this also represents a great challenge because of the high implementation costs, the breadth of a possibilities, and difficulty building a solution that works for the organization. Enter the Design Sprint, a new option for outsmarting the typical Salesforce implementation challenges.

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The Rebranding Process

Recently I was having a conversation with the CEO of a local media broadcast organization and I was outlining what a rebranding process should look like for their organization. I thought it would make for a great blog post, so here goes (By the way, I’m sorry in advance for the length of this post— I’m only skimming the surface of all of these ideas and issues, but as you can see it is an incredibly complex process).

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The Tim Ferriss Podcast with Ed Catmull, Author of Creativity, Inc.

I'm a big fan of Tim Ferriss' best-selling title, the 4 Hour Workweek and I like a lot of what he has to say. I don't agree with everything he endorses, but I love his approach to lifestyle design. I also loved the book, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Disney Animation. So this episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast with Catmull as his guest is a no-brainer. If you are interested at all in what makes Pixar and Disney Animation so successful, interested in some more Ed's personal insight into the life of Steve Jobs or if you just liked the book, take a listen.

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