^The APQC Blog

As I was pulling together content recently around millennials in the workforce, I realized my daughter is the youngest of the millennial range – born in 1995. Millennials, according to APQC’s study definition, are born 1980 – 1995. Why not ask her a few questions to see if her thoughts correlate with other millennials in APQC’s recent study, Millennials in the Supply Chain Workforce.

In honor of boss’s day, we’re taking a look at what employees can do to help their managers. Be sure to also checkout APQC’s research into how people and organizations can improve leadership as well as our advice on what individuals can do to become better people managers.

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 My Drug by Kesha.

Curious Events Day, which arrived without much fanfare on October 9, merits significantly more attention than it is likely to get. Imagine a day dedicated to indulging your curiosity!

Curiosity is a motivator. People who are curious want to know how things work and why things are the way they are. And as they discover the “hows” and “whys,” they begin to look at things in a different way, which leads to novel ideas and perspectives.

The main reason I go to the Aspen Ideas Festival is for the new ideas, models, and people.

I never would have met Henry Elkus elsewhere. 

Henry is a twenty-something entrepreneur who envisioned a global network in his Yale dorm room.

How Royal Bank of Canada Engaged Employees in Agile

Making organizational change stick is one of the most common and vexing challenges faced by organizations today. In a recent webinar, APQC members heard how Canada’s largest bank, with offices in 37 countries and more than 80,000 employees, got change to stick when it introduced the principles of Agile across the enterprise.

As I write this blog (from the local Starbucks), many parts of APQC’s hometown of Houston are still working to recover from Hurricane Harvey, an incredibly destructive Category 4 storm that hit Texas and Louisiana in late August 2017. This storm was considered a flood disaster, dumping a total of between 40 and 50 inches of rain in southeast Texas, and inundating many parts of Houston that had never flooded before.

Much is being said these days about blockchain, also referred to as distributed ledger technology, and its impact on business. Let’s be honest with each other: are you familiar with blockchain? If you are not, then the good news is that you are not alone. And if you are extremely familiar, you are in fairly limited company.

I talked to Roy Barnes, author of ‘Customer Experience for Dummies’ about the difference between customer service and customer experience and how better process improvement matters for both. 

Due to their sheer volume in the workplace, we are constantly bombarded with information and analysis about what the Millennial generation (born in the early 1980’s to the late 1990’s) desires in terms of workplace expectations, office environment, norms, and culture. However, there are at least two other generations (Baby Boomers, born in the mid 1940’s to the mid 1960’s; and Generation X, born in the mid 1960’s to early 1980’s) in the workplace today that are largely ignored in terms of all of the attention and hype, but still nonetheless important.