‘I don’t remember forgetting I don’t seem to recall If I neglected to show you I love you I don’t remember at all.’ Ricky Skaggs Anyone who’s been in a relationship for more than, oh, a fortnight has learned the link between memory and caring. Forget to call: you clearly don’t care. Don’t remember that [...]

“I wish they would only take me as I am” – Vincent Van Gogh Personas are essential to Customer Experience Management. It’s a given that good design begins with understanding the design target. A Persona nets-out as a “word portrait” of a customer type, distilling the essential elements of a market segment. The richer and more [...]

Confession: I believe in superstar Engineers. Nowadays, given the Agile emphasis on Team, reliance on Superstars seems to be roughly as fashionable as fat ties. Embracing inequality of production can also be perceived as naïve by the folks paying their salaries (why pay the big dollars in the Silicon Valley when engineers can be had [...]

New Year is the traditional time to swear off the calories and pledge a leaner you. Recently, the R&D team at KANA has been exploring a different form of getting Lean via the work of Mary Poppendieck. Poppendieck is the author of Leading Lean Software Development . She’s the leading thinker on the intersection of [...]

‘Buzz’ – the word that defines social media is lifted from the world of social insects. But, while we freely employ metaphors from the hive to human interaction, how much are we actually learning from the commonality of nature’s communities to online social networks? As enterprises engage in the Social world, the needed, core and [...]

Saw Bill Cosby the day after Thanksgiving. He told the story of “Phil’s Famous Stuffing”. Phil, a craftsman in Cosby’s employ, is known, far and wide, across the townships of rural Massachusetts, for making the world’s greatest stuffing. Cosby described how folks drive out and line up at Phil’s each turkey day to get a [...]

You can reliably count on Apple to penetrate to the heart of technology’s impact on our life. So, no surprise that they named their introductory mobile app MobileMe (now replaced by iCloud). In the ever-sloshing sea of hype around new technology, separating the ripples from the tsunamis is not as easy as it should be.  [...]

Sure, Gordon Ramsay is too good looking, seems to bask in celebrity, acts like a rude sod, and teaches management by intimidation. But, if, as one suspects, his eponymous London showpiece reflects the man, you gotta like him. Ramsay runs a terrific restaurant. No, we’re not talking French Laundry or Joel Robuchon here, my standards [...]

The Keynote Speaker at this year’s KANA Summit is Ross Shafer. Ross comes from one of those backgrounds that shouts “only in America.” He grew up on a Reservation, opened a restaurant, transformed himself into a game and talk show host, morphed into a motivational speaker and now is a best-selling author on what motivates [...]

I wrote this blog when Steve Jobs announced his retirement from Apple. Tragically it has now become an eulogy to a great man. It’s worth repeating. When Steve Jobs launched the iPad, he described it as ‘revolutionary’, ‘unbelievably great’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘truly magical’. He could just as easily have been talking about himself. No one in [...]