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 [...]

“I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.” Chef Thomas Keller. I live in a tiny, tiny town called Yountville. For foodies, Yountville is synonymous with Thomas Keller and his superlative French Laundry restaurant. As America’s greatest chef, Keller has branded our little [...]

A silly bird shows up, like clockwork, outside my living room and expends an hour or two, each and every afternoon, flying into our window. Whack. Whack. Whack: head first, into the glass. Einstein famously said that doing the same thing over and over yet expecting a different result is the precise definition of insanity. [...]

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 our lifetime will have more impact on how we live, today and tomorrow. Apple was a significant investor in a company I founded a while [...]

What does it mean to ‘manage‘ an experience? Well, the great painters know. When a master of manufacturing experiences such as Picasso wants us to ‘feel’ an emotion, we experience precisely what the artist desires. What does Picasso do to plunge us into the experiential depths of sadness? Naturally, he soaks his blue period paintings [...]

The most common question from prospects and clients is: “What can/could we do to lower implementation risk?”. I suppose this is actually a polite form of the question: “What can software vendors do to make implementations go better?”. Well, based on the lessons learned from dozens of “post-mortems”, there is a clear answer. KANA is [...]

Agile 2011, the annual summit for all things Agile, is this week. KANA’s own Yukari Huguenard, Agile Program Manager extraordinaire, will be in attendance, along with some 1,600 Scrum evangelists, veteran practitioners and befuddled newbies. For KANA, as you know, Agile is much more than a software development method. The Agile approach is the heart & [...]

Kate Leggett, ex-colleague and now respected Forrester analyst, puts her finger on the central significance of Inquira’s demise at Oracle’s gentle hands. Stand-alone KM is officially dead. Of course, the last out-of-business sign on the last buggy whip maker didn’t signal the end of horseless carriages, it memorialized that end. Still, milestones are milestones: the [...]

Social Media Monitoring or Social Listening is the rage these days, but what’s the payback? Every new technology must, in the end, justify its existence by delivering tangible business value. Of course, ‘Listening’ is one of those rare activities where little justification is required. In fact, as I found when googling for a nice pearl [...]