Category Archives: Commentary

Digital thinking

A great example of digital thinking applied to real businesses in this story about the new CEO of struggling UK wine shop Majestic Wines. They are reconsidering some of its commercial practices, such as their six-bottle minimum purchase, some staffing policies, such as the … Continue reading

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Too many Oreos (or: I don’t like social media)

The famous 2013 Oreo Superbowl tweet seems to still be making the rounds in digital marketing conferences. I find this quite amazing because its actual, real-world result was in fact quite small: #lt #AdobeSymp Oreos: all that for just 15k retweets. https://t.co/E28EbtFkAE /cc … Continue reading

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6 years with ASICS

After 6 years looking after the digital activities of Japanese sportswear brand ASICS (first in Europe, and since 2011 at global headquarters), I found it was now time for me to explore new activities. But before I’m fully ready to move … Continue reading

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Coca Cola’s Georgia coffee nasty “ambush” pop-up stunt

The other day, a colleague got back to the office with a flyer advertising a pop-up coffee store around the corner from our office, in a gentrified-fashionable part of Tokyo. It advertised free coffee. We needed to have a business … Continue reading

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Enterprise Development Works (Sort Of)

Finally, I believe I understand what’s good about “enterprise software.” Until now, I thought “enterprise” was a conventional justification for inferior, bloated, and massively costly software that hardly did what it was supposed to, and certainly in a way that … Continue reading

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Larry Page successful as Google’s “wartime CEO”

A very interesting read on Larry Page’s first few months as Google’s new CEO, saddled with the immense challenge of taking a hugely successful company to even bigger heights: RT @hunterwalk: Read @bhorowitz ‘wartime CEO’ bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/pea… & then @mhelft tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/03/goo… … Continue reading

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Social customer support: 5 rules to avoid disappointment

Over the past few years, social customer support has really taken off. KLM was covered in the business press for making its service agents available through social media channels (they’re on Twitter with 316k followers and 94k public tweets, Facebook … Continue reading

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Surviving low-bandwidth internet

This week, I’m working in China. At the moment, I’ve got a room in a fancy hotel in a peripheral neighborhood of Shanghai, where my company is holding its sales conference. Bad internet is not a stranger to high-end hotels … Continue reading

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Voting for expat MPs

Yesterday (in America) and today (elsewhere outside of metropolitan France), French citizens registered before 31 December 2011 with their consulate were able to vote for a member of parliament. For the first time, the French living abroad will have dedicated … Continue reading

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Interfaces for business software (lessons from working on an e-commerce platform)

A decade ago when I ran web agency Splandigo with a couple of associates, I was in charge of building or maintaining software for the company. Most of the design work went to the front-end of sites, and it’s only … Continue reading

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