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Silver Bells, Marketing, and Sales
(Hopefully you read the blog title with a Deep South accent.) Happy holidays, reader! I’m going to begin this post with a slightly embarrassing self-quote from 5 years ago, when I was a first-year MBA student. The following is an excerpt from the introduction I wrote for a marketing plan…
Could You Please Direct Me to the Talent Aisle?
Talent is all around us and we don’t even know it. Well, hold on. Let me modify that statement. Talent is all around us and sometimes we don’t even know it. I’m a volleyball player, so when I compete against a tall, athletic-looking guy, I’m generally not surprised to find out that he’s a…
Introducing the Same Old, Brand New, Digital Me!
You can tell a lot about how digital your life has become simply by examining the thirty minutes before and after you sleep each night. When I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was swipe the screen of my [digital] phone to turn off my [digital] alarm clock, which was blaring Your Love is…
Overconfidence in Full Effect
Every so often, I hear the hilarious statistic cited that ninety percent of drivers think that they are better than the average driver. It goes without saying that this is a mathematical impossibility. And it demonstrates the proven cognitive bias known as “illusory superiority.” Why, in an…
2017 Is the Year of the Case Study
At APQC, we like to maintain constant contact with our members to ensure that our research aligns as closely as possible with their business needs. While our members’ interests and challenges fluctuate from year to year, one piece of feedback we receive from them remains constant: they love case…
Doing Good with Data at the University of Chicago
About a month ago, I got the chance to interview Lauren Haynes, Associate Director at the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago and a fellow presenter at next week’s Predictive Analytics World conference in Chicago. Lauren and I talked about how data…
Worthless Words about Priceless Memories
I’m going to start off this blog with a few (seemingly) random facts. First, it’s springtime. Second, my friends and I are in our late twenties. Finally, I participate in social media. These facts are relatively meaningless on their own, but, when taken in combination, they can mean only one thing…
Building a Data-driven Organization Starts with Culture
When I was in secondary school learning how to write essays, my teachers beat me over the head with the following adage about how to structure a paper: “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.” Well, I’m about to tell you what I’m going to tell…
Using Data to Build Trust at Airbnb
In case you haven’t been stalking my LinkedIn page—and you really should; it’s a thrilling read— I’d like to take this opportunity to inform you that I am, in fact, a Los Angeles-based, remote employee of APQC. This means that, periodically, I travel to Houston for a week or so at a time to…