I had the good fortune to work with Dr. Amar Bose and with the great company he founded. I helped to bring into the world two blockbuster products – BOSE’s Noise-Cancelling Headphones and the BOSE® Wave® Music System. Here are seven product development process lessons learned from our experience creating products enjoyed by millions of customers. Lesson #1: Noise-Cancelling Headphones Were Not ...

The world is at the precipice of one of the most dramatic shifts in history: the transition from an industrial society to one that is based on a deep understanding of an entirely new form of knowledge capital, behavior—our behaviors as well as those of the intelligent machines that we are building. The industrial model on which we have built ...

This is the third & final article on embracing digitization, transformation and innovation. We are living in an era where that is defined by one continual exponential technology wave after another, called the Digital Age. It is transforming everything we do, from how we do business and especially in how we learn, lead and coach people. In fact, we have ...

This is the first of three articles on embracing digitization, transformation and innovation. It is becoming more and more apparent that we are living in a moment of profound possibility and enormous disruption. Where the old business paradigms are dying and innovative new ones are emerging, especially creating new ways of integrating people and technology through focusing digitization efforts. What ...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States was an industrial and technological backwater. Still mostly an agrarian nation, bright young students would often go to Europe to pursue advanced degrees in the sciences, because American universities were considered second rate. By the end of the century though, the United States had become the center of the technological ...

Recently, Match-Maker Ventures and Arthur D. Little have released an interesting report, titled “The Age of Collaboration“. The study does a good job in synthesizing the global state of play of corporate-startup collaboration and latest findings on success requirements for its implementation. More and more corporations seek to engage with startups by pursuing corresponding activities across dedicated ecosystems and incorporating them in exploration units along with ...

“Stealing the role of customer success manager from the world of SaaS is the key to making your digital transformation efforts a success.” I was speaking with a headhunter recently about some of the roles she was recruiting for and there was one that captured my attention. It was a posting she had for a customer success manager at one ...

In Weapons of Math Destruction, mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil paints a disturbing picture of how data can go awry. “Black box” algorithms that make decisions with little to no transparency or accountability can lead to bizarre situations in which judgments are handed down with no possibility of appeal. For example, she tells the story of Sarah Wysocki, a teacher ...

Followers of technology, in consumer electronics, might remember that at the beginning of the new millennium, we observed a new trend named technological convergence: product/ categories barriers started intersecting and overlapping, while categories themselves – traditionally based on one functional aspect – stopped making sense from a consumer point of view. This technological trend culminated with the smartification of phones ...

To understand the challenges and opportunities associated with digitalization, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte surveyed more than 3,700 business executives, managers, and analysts from organizations around the world. They have recently published their findings in a report, titled Aligning the Organization for Its Digital Future.