Because of the COVID crisis, businesses all over the globe have been scrambling mightily to cope with remote work, remote marketing, remote sales meetings, and e-everything. According to Forbes, 97% of executives report that the pandemic sped up their digital transformations, while McKinsey proclaimed the COVID crisis gave us more than ten years’ worth of…
Don Peppers’ blog posts are followed by nearly 300K on LinkedIn. He was among the first invited to be a LinkedIn Key Influencer when the program began in 2012. Today, he is one of LinkedIn’s top CX experts.

Six Ways for Facebook to Restore Trust
Facebook’s financial success is based on the enormous amount of advertising revenue it generates, but there are frequent conflicts between generating higher ad revenues and furthering the best interests of its users (Facebook’s “customers” aren’t the users themselves, but the advertisers and others who access users’ data)…If you were a senior executive at Facebook today…
Eddie Van Halen: Pioneer of Checklist Management
In October, 2020, Eddie Van Halen, icon of the hard rock scene, passed away. What many don’t know is that Van Halen was not only an extremely creative and successful hard rock performer, but also a pioneering user of checklists, as an indispensable management tool. As an early heavy metal rock band, when Van Halen…
With COVID, Customer Data Has Become More Important Than Ever
With technology’s steady improvement, individual customer data has steadily gained importance, but the COVID crisis has proven to be like gasoline poured on a smoldering fire. Start with the fact that the business world is already chock full of companies whose customer data is heavily siloed, with incomplete or conflicting customer profiles, and poorly organized,…
The “Infinite Game” of Customer Centricity
…Fundamentally, the concept of finite and infinite games is a way to explain the nature of human motivation. Is a person motivated by some finite, achievable goal? A particular task to be accomplished or some milestone to be reached? Or is a person instead motivated by a larger, never-ending purpose of some kind – a…
“Big Data” – Coming to a Customer Experience Near You
In thinking about how to assess the customer experience, it’s important to keep two different kinds of data in mind: observational data and interactive data. The Voice of Customer surveys you do, whether you use NPS or some other customer satisfaction metric, represent interactive data. And there’s no better judge of the quality of a customer experience than…
Goodhart’s Law: The Biggest Threat to CX Data Accuracy?
Amy Edmondson, a professor in leadership at Harvard Business School, was once surprised by the results of a research project she helped put together to study how leadership and co-worker relations would impact organizational performance. At two urban teaching hospitals she surveyed nurses who worked on eight different teams, some of which were managed by…
“The One to One Future” – Are We There Yet?
Way back in 1990 when I first met Martha Rogers, we had a whirlwind discussion about the future of marketing and agreed on the spot to work on a book together. It took us three years of faxing back and forth, but our book described a vision of how businesses would have to operate differently once…
Avoiding “Quant Bias”
In a recent interview for Forbes, Lynzie Riebling, VP of Insights & Strategy at REVOLT TV, deplored the “quant bias” that prevented most companies from getting more out of their research efforts. What she meant by this term was that many executives seem to place more credence in research findings that can be quantified, to the point that…
Covid-19 Testing: Making Sense of the Figures
The accuracy and usefulness of Covid testing figures have been called into question. Some argue that the only reason we have more cases today is because we’re doing more testing. There has even been a suggestion that if we slowed the testing down, or if we just did a bit less testing, then we’d have…