Consumer Insights Quotes

CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, prey-stalking, lethal prowler. MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing. CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing. MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged. CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed. MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy-footed. CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher bacterium, warm-life destroying. MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life-nurturing. CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding... planet-cremating. MORPHEUS: I am the Universe -- all things encompassing, all life embracing. CHORONZON: I am Anti-Life, the Beast of Judgment. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds... of everything. Sss. And what will you be then, Dreamlord? MORPHEUS: I am hope.

I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.

The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.

Death devours not only those who have been cooked by old age; it also feasts on those who are half-cooked and even those who are raw.

Allah gives us gifts, but then we come to love them as we should only love Him. We take those gifts and inject them into our hearts, until they take over. Soon we cannot live without them. Every waking moment is spent in contemplation of them, in submission and worship to them. The mind and the heart that was created by Allah, for Allah, becomes the property of someone or something else. And then the fear comes. The fear of loss begins to cripple us. The gift—that should have remained in our hands—takes over our heart, so the fear of losing it consumes us. Soon, what was once a gift becomes a weapon of torture and a prison of our own making. How can we be freed of this? At times, in His infinite mercy, Allah frees us…by taking it away. As a result of it being taken, we turn to Allah wholeheartedly. In that desperation and need, we ask, we beg, we pray. Through the loss, we reach a level of sincerity and humility and dependence on Him which we would otherwise not reach—had it not been taken from us. Through the loss, our hearts turn entirely to face Him.

For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.

Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn’t viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption.

The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.

In another timely insight, Frankl saw that a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are “guzzling away” without any thought of morality.

We become blinded by arrogance when we’re utterly convinced of our strengths and our strategies. We get paralyzed by doubt when we lack conviction in both. We can be consumed by an inferiority complex when we know the right method but feel uncertain about our ability to execute it. What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.” Our

Consumers with otaku are the sneezers you seek. They’re the ones who will take the time to learn about your product, take the risk to try your product, and take their friends’ time to tell them about it. The flash of insight is that some markets have more otaku-stricken consumers than others. The task of the remarkable marketer is to identify these markets and focus on them to the exclusion of lesser markets – regardless of relative size.

The average person walks into their doctor's office ready to accept whatever is said and handed to them. Without taking time to research or gain more insight, they accept pills and treatment without looking into other options. Our nation overeats. We put toxic fake food into our bodies, but wonder why we're sick. We continue a vicious cycle of consuming the wrong foods and drinks along with a stressful lifestyle, yet question why cancer is so rampant. Most of our society live in fear and believe they have no control. My positive message is that we do have control. We need to take back ownership of our bodies and minds. Don't blindly fill prescriptions without first checking into potential side effects, adverse reactions, and long-term damage to your body and mind. Be conscious of what you are consuming. Be informed. Take the initiative to gain more knowledge. Understand your options so you may be in a better position to make an informed choice.

Chapter 4,‘Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief’, uses Zizek’s (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse. Whilst highlighting the pervasive misrepresentations that characterise these accounts, the chapter also implicates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation to organised abuse and women’s and children’s accounts of sexual abuse more generally.

*And to keep her immune system strong she followed Dr. Goodhue's advice to abstain from alcohol, get plenty of fresh air and exercise, and consume a nourishing diet, low in salt. Page 144 "Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.". Page 204 "I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death ... Is the true measure of the Divine within us." . . . "I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.". Page 307 **"With wonder and a growing absence of fear she realized, I am more than I was an hour ago.". Page 372 **my favorite!

Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists a) that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or b) that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or c) that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to “purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass” in a pervasively monitored digital environment. In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators’ statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash. To make things worse, the press was—in 1995, at least—clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention—obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography and online predators).

Faith and love will accompany you. Courage and strength will sit on your shoulders and inspiration and divine insight will lead your way to allow you to make the best choices in your life. Life will no longer be a mystery; doubt will no longer consume much of your attention. Problems will still exist, but they will not blur your vision of life. Problems will no longer define your life and the force of goodness coupled with the love for the spirit will find its way into every area of your life and influence and correct it as needed.

We often confuse love for a warm glow we sense in our bellies and as something we can offer and withdraw, like a cat who comes and goes at its pleasure. It’s easy for us to extend love toward those who are lovable, but loving people and situations that are not to our liking isn’t so easy. We give our love “unconditionally,” but when we don’t receive what we feel we deserve, we withdraw it. We then reinvest our love in a new person or situation that we think will give us a better return, but we find it difficult to maintain when we don’t feel recognized or acknowledged. If things don’t work out the way we want them to, we too readily exchange our loving feelings for hatred and resentment. Our initial excitement over a new job, for instance, may sour and become disappointment and bitterness. When we’ve been jilted by a lover, the intense, starry-eyed passion of infatuation can turn into loathing so great that it consumes us. To an Earthkeeper, love is not a feeling or something you barter with. Love is the essence of who you are, and it radiates from you as a brilliant aura: You become love, practice fearlessness, and attain enlightenment.

Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live. For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labour as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption. Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns of Iowa to be our neighbours, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties.

In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these “winner-take-all” markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with “imperfect substitution,” which Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market.

EAGLE The East direction is represented by eagle and condor, who bring vision, clarity, and foresight. Eagle perceives the entire panorama of life without becoming bogged down in its details. The energies of eagle assist us in finding the guiding vision of our lives. The eyes of condor see into the past and the future, helping to know where we come from, and who we are becoming. When I work with a client who is stuck in the traumas of the past, I help her to connect with the spirit of eagle or condor. As this energy infuses the healing space, my client is often able to attain new clarity and insight into her life. This is not an intellectual insight, but rather a call, faint at first, hardly consciously heard. Her possibilities beckon to her and propel her out of her grief and into her destiny. I believe that while everyone has a future, only certain people have a destiny. Having a destiny means living to your fullest human potential. You don’t need to become a famous politician or poet, but your destiny has to be endowed with meaning and purpose. You could be a street sweeper and be living a destiny. You could be the president of a large corporation and be living a life bereft of meaning. One can make oneself available to destiny, but it requires a great deal of courage to do so. Otherwise our destiny bypasses us, leaving us deprived of a fulfillment known by those who choose to take the road less traveled. Eagle allows us to rise above the mundane battles that occupy our lives and consume our energy and attention. Eagle gives us wings to soar above trivial day-to-day struggles into the high peaks close to Heaven. Eagle and condor represent the self-transcending principle in nature. Biologists have identified the self-transcending principle as one of the prime agendas of evolution. Living molecules seek to transcend their selfhood to become cells, then simple organisms, which then form tissues, then organs, and then evolve into complex beings such as humans and whales. Every transcending jump is inclusive of all of the levels beneath it. Cells are inclusive of molecules, yet transcend them; organs are inclusive of cells, yet go far beyond them; whales are inclusive of organs yet cannot be described by them, as the whole transcends the sum of its parts. The transcending principle represented by eagle states that problems at a certain level are best solved by going up one step. The problems of cells are best resolved by organs, while the needs of organs are best addressed by an organism such as a butterfly or a human. The same principle operates in our lives. Think of nested Russian dolls. Material needs are the tiny doll in the center. The larger emotional doll encompasses them, and both are contained within the outermost spiritual doll. In this way, we cannot satisfy emotional needs with material things, but we can satisfy them spiritually. When we go one step up, our emotional needs are addressed in the solution. We rise above our life dilemmas on the wings of eagle and see our lives in perspective.

The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this regard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within. The aim in the case being economic efficiency rather than punishment, this was a regime whose intent was not to torture but rather to manage the depletion of life that resulted from the conditions of saltwater slavery. But for the Africans who were starved, sorted, and warped to make them into saltwater slaves, torture was the result. It takes no great insight to point to the role of violence in the Atlantic slave trade. But to understand what happened to Africans in this system of human trafficking requires us to ask precisely what kind of violence it requires to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into Atlantic commodities.

Your story isn’t powerful enough if all it does is lead the horse to water; it has to inspire the horse to drink, too. On social media, the only story that can achieve that goal is one told with native content. Native content amps up your story’s power. It is crafted to mimic everything that makes a platform attractive and valuable to a consumer—the aesthetics, the design, and the tone. It also offers the same value as the other content that people come to the platform to consume. Email marketing was a form of native content. It worked well during the 1990s because people were already on email; if you told your story natively and provided consumers with something they valued on that platform, you got their attention. And if you jabbed enough to put them in a purchasing mind-set, you converted. The rules are the same now that people spend their time on social media. It can’t tell you what story to tell, but it can inform you how your consumer wants to hear it, when he wants to hear it, and what will most make him want to buy from you. For example, supermarkets or fast-casual restaurants know from radio data that one of the ideal times to run an ad on the radio is around 5:00 P.M., when moms are picking up the kids and deciding what to make for dinner, and even whether they have the energy to cook. Social gives you the same kind of insight. Maybe the data tells you that you should post on Facebook early in the morning before people settle

We must become what we wish to teach. As an aside to parents, teachers, psychotherapists, and managers who may be reading this book to gain insight on how to support the self-esteem of others, I want to say that the place to begin is still with oneself. If one does not understand how the dynamics of self-esteem work internally—if one does not know by direct experience what lowers or raises one’s own self-esteem—one will not have that intimate understanding of the subject necessary to make an optimal contribution to others. Also, the unresolved issues within oneself set the limits of one’s effectiveness in helping others. It may be tempting, but it is self-deceiving to believe that what one says can communicate more powerfully than what one manifests in one’s person. We must become what we wish to teach. There is a story I like to tell psychotherapy students. In India, when a family encounters a problem, they are not likely to consult a psychotherapist (hardly any are available); they consult the local guru. In one village there was a wise man who had helped this family more than once. One day the father and mother came to him, bringing their nine-year-old son, and the father said, “Master, our son is a wonderful boy and we love him very much. But he has a terrible problem, a weakness for sweets that is ruining his teeth and health. We have reasoned with him, argued with him, pleaded with him, chastised him—nothing works. He goes on consuming ungodly quantities of sweets. Can you help us?” To the father’s surprise, the guru answered, “Go away and come back in two weeks.” One does not argue with a guru, so the family obeyed. Two weeks later they faced him again, and the guru said, “Good. Now we can proceed.” The father asked, “Won’t you tell us, please, why you sent us away for two weeks. You have never done that before.” And the guru answered, “I needed the two weeks because I, too, have had a lifelong weakness for sweets. Until I had confronted and resolved that issue within myself, I was not ready to deal with your son.” Not all psychotherapists like this story.

It describes a significantly different way of life. For instance, the Manuscript predicts that we humans will voluntarily decrease our population so that we all may live in the most powerful and beautiful places on the Earth. But remarkably, many more of these areas will exist in the future, because we will intentionally let the forests go uncut so that they can mature and build energy. “According to the Ninth Insight, by the middle of the next millennium,” he continued, “humans will typically live among five hundred year old trees and carefully tended gardens, yet within easy travel distance of an urban area of incredible technological wizardry. By then, the means of survival—foodstuffs and clothing and transportation—will all be totally automated and at everyone’s disposal. Our needs will be completely met without the exchange of any currency, yet also without any overindulgence or laziness. “Guided by their intuitions, everyone will know precisely what to do and when to do it, and this will fit harmoniously with the actions of others. No one will consume excessively because we will have let go of the need to possess and to control for security. In the next millennium, life will have become about something else. “According to the Manuscript,” he went on, “our sense of purpose will be satisfied by the thrill of our own evolution—by the elation of receiving intuitions and then watching closely as our destinies unfold. The Ninth depicts a human world where everyone has slowed down and become more alert, ever vigilant for the next meaningful encounter that comes along. We will know that it could occur anywhere: on a path that winds through a forest, for instance, or on a bridge that traverses some canyon. “Can you visualize human encounters that have this much meaning and significance? Think how it would be for two people meeting for the first time. Each will first observe the other’s energy field, exposing any manipulations. Once clear, they will consciously share life stories until, elatedly, messages are discovered. Afterward, each will go forward again on their individual journey, but they will be significantly altered. They will vibrate at a new level and will thereafter touch others in a way not possible before their meeting.

Aurobindo’s orientation has yielded important new insights into the thought of the Vedic seers (rishi), who “saw” the truth. He showed a way out of the uninspiring scholarly perspective, with its insistence that the Vedic seers were “primitive” poets obsessed with natural phenomena like thunder, lightning, and rain. The one-dimensional “naturalistic” interpretations proffered by other translators missed out on the depth of the Vedic teachings. Thus Sūrya is not only the visible material Sun but also the psychological-spiritual principle of inner luminosity. Agni is not merely the physical fire that consumes the sacrificial offerings but the spiritual principle of purifying transformation. Parjanya does not only stand for rain but also the inner “irrigation” of grace. Soma is not merely the concoction the sacrificial priests poured into the fire but also (as in the later Tantric tradition) the magical inner substance that transmutes the body and the mind. The wealth prayed for in many hymns is not just material prosperity but spiritual riches. The cows mentioned over and over again in the hymns are not so much the biological animals but spiritual light. The Panis are not just human merchants but various forces of darkness. When Indra slew Vritra and released the floods, he not merely inaugurated the monsoon season but also unleashed the powers of life (or higher energies) within the psyche of the priest. For Indra also stands for the mind and Vritra for psychological restriction, or energetic blockage. Aurobindo contributed in a major way to a thorough reappraisal of the meaning of the Vedic hymns, and his work encouraged a number of scholars to follow suit, including Jeanine Miller and David Frawley.2 There is also plenty of deliberate, artificial symbolism in the hymns. In fact, the figurative language of the Rig-Veda is extraordinarily rich, as Willard Johnson has demonstrated.3 In special sacrificial symposia, the hymn composers met to share their poetic creations and stimulate each other’s creativity and comprehension of the subtle realities of life. Thus many hymns are deliberately enigmatic, and often we can only guess at the solutions to their enigmas and allegorical riddles. Heinrich Zimmer reminded us: The myths and symbols of India resist intellectualization and reduction to fixed significations. Such treatments would only sterilize them of their magic.

Bali Style Magazine, Book Review. James Fenton. "Books About Food and Spirit. Bali's Food Culture." Vol. 10, no.2 May 2014 “To an outsider, the cuisine of Bali is perhaps one of its least visible cultural features. Just about every visitor to the ‘island of the gods’ will have witnessed the spell-binding beauty of Bali’s brightly festooned temples and colourful ceremonies. Many of us have had the experience of being stopped in traffic while a long procession of Balinese in traditional dress pass by. However, how many of us have witnessed first-hand the intrinsic cultural links between Bali’s cuisine and its culture and religion? How many of us have witnessed the pains-taking predawn rituals of preparing the many and varied dishes that accompany a traditional celebration, such as Lawar or Babi Guling? In Balinese Food: The Traditional Cuisine & Food Culture of Bali, social and cultural historian Dr. Vivienne Kruger has compiled a meticulously researched record of the many aspects of Balinese cuisine—from the secular to the spiritual—with an eye for detail that evades most observers. In the book Dr Kruger chronicles in careful detail the ceremonies, rituals and practices that accompany virtually all of Bali’s unique culinary arts—from satay to sambal. All the classic Balinese dishes are represented such as a babi guling, the popular spit-roast pork to bebek betutu, whole smoked duck—each accompanied with a detailed recipe for those who would like to have a go at preparing the dish themselves. Lesser known aspects of Bali’s intriguing eating habits are also presented here. You may not know that the Balinese enjoy catching and eating such delicacies as dragon flies and rice paddy eels. Dog is also widely eaten around the island, and regretfully, endangered species of turtle are still consumed on some occasions. In all, Dr. Kruger has prepared a spicy and multi-layered dish as delicious and pains-takingly prepared as the dishes described within to create an impressive work of scholarship jampacked with information and insight into the rarely seen world of Bali’s cultural cuisine.

Network analysis can be focused, they argue, on three separate regions of commerce: organizational network analysis, value network analysis, and influence analysis, which map loosely to internal, vendor, and consumer populations.

Apple is well connected to its fan and professional user base and it does use research to generate insights into customer behaviour. Interestingly though, this seems not to be about asking people to suggest what they want, but rather to explore people’s whole lives (not just what they do as consumers at the point of purchase) and from there to make the imaginative leap to innovation.

LEADERSHIP | Intuit’s CEO on Building a Design-Driven Company Brad Smith | 222 words Although 46 similar products were on the market when Intuit launched Quicken, in 1983, it immediately became the market leader in personal finance software and has held that position for three decades. That’s because Quicken was so well designed that using it is intuitive. But by the time Smith became CEO, in 2008, the company had become overly focused on adding incremental features that delivered ease of use but not delight. What was missing was an emotional connection with customers. He and his team set out to integrate design thinking into every part of Intuit. They changed the layout of the office, reduced the number of cubes, and added more collaboration spaces and places for impromptu work. They increased the number of designers by nearly 600% and now hold quarterly design conferences. They bring in people who have created exceptionally designed products, such as the Nest thermostat and the Kayak travel website, to share insights with Intuit employees. The company acquired one start-up, called Mint, and collaborates with another, called ZenPayroll, to improve customer experience. Although most people don’t think of financial software as a category driven by emotion or design, Smith writes, Intuit’s D4D (“design for delight”) program has paid off. For example, its SnapTax app, inspired by consumers’ migration to smartphones, led one user to write, “I want this app to have my babies.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

athletes and other incredibly accomplished individuals to trigger themselves into peak performance states? Imagine how satisfying it will be for you to spend the bulk of your time in positive and highly productive and flow states! Some more tips on how to build a positive and pragmatic psychology The good news is that you neither need to be perfect nor become a saint! In most cases, aim for high quality but avoid the trap of absolute perfectionism that is unnecessary and consumes much more time and energy than called for; use your best judgment. (Notable exceptions to whether perfectionism is called for would be rare events such as brain or heart

mentees to focus their time and energy on the causes (for example, replacing a limiting belief with an empowering one or sharpening practical relationship building and oratory skills), not on the effects (for example, spending time and energy worrying or feeling sorry for yourself or being consumed with negative self-talk about not getting a desired role at a target organization). In addition to nourishing their mind and spirit, I teach them on how to fish and fly better so they can soar, adding to their arsenal of confidence-enhancing achievements and skills. With sound causes, positive effects will typically take care of themselves. It’s wise to track both causes and effects. Doing so will help you learn valuable patterns of

Segmentation: Consumers’ purchasing behavior and attitudes towards brands differ from one market sector to another, depending largely on product-, market- and distribution-related factors. For this reason, the value of a brand can only be determined precisely through the separate assessment of individual segments that represent a homogenous customer group. Apart from this, brand management can only obtain the insights it needs to increase the brand’s value systematically if the brand has been evaluated in all its segments.

At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired. The worst case with a 90th percentile candidate is that they have an average year. They are unlikely to become the worst performer in the company. An average candidate, however, will not only consume massive training resources, but is also just as likely to end up performing well below average as above average.

More and more, I am of the opinion that part, if not much of the problem with the child welfare system, is that most of those administering and leading the system have never experienced it as a consumer of its services and seldom do they seek guidance and input from their clients. This is a bit like asking a third-generation millionaire to explain poverty and develop methods to eradicate homelessness.

I’d like to share with you a parable: the parable of Bob the Angel. A girl was walking down a darkly lit city street late at night. A man jumped out from the shadows and attacked her, suddenly she was suffocating and disoriented as hands clasped around her neck and the force of his attack started to push her down. She tried to yell as she struggled to pull his arms from her neck while she crumpled backwards to the ground, “God . . . help me!” The next thing she remembers—just as the fear consumed her, and right as she disappeared into the misery and despair of helplessness—was a loud crash and an explosion of glass which rained down upon her and her attacker. The assailant’s lifeless body was suspended above her, held from collapsing on her by an unknown force, and then pulled away from hovering over her and dropped onto the pavement beside her. She opened her eyes in the faint shadowy light, to see black matted hair and a long, black beard framing the eyes of a man. The smell of alcohol on his breath would have knocked her out if the adrenaline was not still trilling through her veins. There he stood, God’s angel, off-kilter and drunk, with a broken whiskey bottle in his hand. “You probably shouldn’t be walking through here this late at night,” was all he said as he turned away. “Wait! What’s your name?” she asked, still stunned half sitting up on the ground. All she heard as he walked away was his trailing voice calling, “Bob’s as good as any. . . .” An angel is a messenger, and sometimes we only want letters sent in white envelopes with beautiful gold print, when sometimes a simple “no” on the back of a gum wrapper is what we are offered. Every postcard from heaven does not come with a picture of the sunset there, nor should it. If it is an answer we want, an answer we will get. As far as pretty postcards, there are many others willing to send us that. If not harps and gold-tipped wings, what then is the mark of an angel? An answer which pierces your soul, and which inspires a question that invites you to look outside of yourself and up to God.

When impact becomes the driving force, usually, a lot of less useful and time-consuming stuff, and even people, find a way of getting out of your way.

The key insight was that when serving the BoP, the firm does not start from the cost to determine the price; rather it has to start from what price the BoP consumers are willing to pay and work backwards to the cost at which the firm has to produce.

avoid that kind of dire scenario, whether they work in the business-to-business (B2B) or the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena.

Other experiments have confirmed the age-old insight that the more we have, the more we want; that life is a progression, not from satisfaction to satisfaction, but from desire to desire. The economist Richard Easterlin asked young people to identify the consumer items they thought essential for the good life; sixteen years later he asked the same people the same question. What happened was that they had moved up the scale of desirables – television, car, house, overseas holidays, swimming pool, second home, etc. – and wherever they had arrived it was always the next item that would finally make them happy.

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

KEY INSIGHTS •   We must learn to lead ourselves before we can expect to effectively lead others. •   Build the skills to do the job, not to get the job. •   To earn credibility as a leader, we must model the desired behaviors for the group. •   The best performers cultivate a high level of self-awareness. They make this an established part of their routine. •   Become a learning machine. Your mode of operation is of a constant learner. •   Your curiosity is the high-octane fuel that propels your growth. •   Strengthened by a feedback-giving coach, purposeful practice leads to improvement. It can be difficult, sometimes frustrating work. Push through it. •   The highest-performing professionals in the world work on the tiniest details of the fundamentals of their craft every day. •   The framework for learning is intake/consume, test, reflect, and teach. •   Don’t let your now become your ceiling. Becoming is better than being.

When we compare ourselves with others, we quickly become consumed with pride or envy, and our passion for Christ quickly fades.

Editorial Review: “Practical, positive money management strategies blend with bankruptcy-specific insights to give consumers a clear picture about how the process of financial recovery works. Anyone considering, in the midst of, or grappling with the aftermath of a bankruptcy should place Bankruptcy Didn't Break Me at the top of their reading list. It goes above and beyond most other guides on the topic, pairing the emotional with business angles in a manner that makes the subject digestible and thoroughly understandable.” . Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

In addition to simply supplying data and insights to existing business units, many of the top-performing companies create a dedicated growth team, which combines marketing, product, and engineering to drive and coordinate the response to these insights. Most companies, even in the highly competitive world of the consumer Internet, still think it’s sufficient to conduct a lot of A/B tests and iterate accordingly. This is an effective tactic but poor strategy, since local optimizations do not necessarily lead to a globally optimal result. A dedicated growth team can look at the big picture and see how product and marketing decisions interact to produce (or not produce) the desired results.

A BIG, BURLY SAMURAI comes to a Zen master and says, “Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.” The Zen master looks him in the face and says, “Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you? A worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?” Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword and raises it to cut off the master’s head. The Zen master says, “That’s hell.” Instantly, the samurai understands that he has just created his own hell—black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment. He sees that he was so deep in hell that he was ready to kill someone. Tears fill his eyes as he puts his palms together to bow in gratitude for this insight. The Zen master says, “That’s heaven.

For example, you could build many companies based on applying the cutting edge predictive analytics and data mining techniques commonly used at consumer web startups, quantitative hedge funds, etc., to less advanced industries.

Every talent God has hidden in you is not for your own consumption; they are for other people’s liberation.

Just like two pieces of wood can be rubbed together to produce fire and the same fire later consumes them both, intellect and concentration support the contemplative meditation. But when the fire of insight arises, it consumes both intellect and concentration, giving way to pristine awareness. This is

Sweet Dreams In the evening I like to “cash out”—something I learned from waiting tables in my youth. Before we could go home, we had to cash out, meaning turn in all our receipts, credit card slips, and cash. Everything had to add up, or there was big trouble! It’s important to cash out your day’s performance. Compared to your plan for the day, how did it go? What do you need to carry over to tomorrow’s plan? What else needs to be added, based on what showed up throughout the day? What’s no longer important and needs to be scratched out? Additionally, I like to log into my journal any new ideas, ah-has or insights I picked up throughout the day—this is how I’ve collected more than forty journals of incredible ideas, insights, and strategies. Finally, I like to read at least ten pages of an inspirational book before going to sleep. I know the mind continues to process the last information consumed before bedtime, so I want to focus my attention on something constructive and helpful in making progress with my goals and ambitions. That’s it. All hell can break loose throughout the day, but because I control the bookends, I know I’m always going to start and finish strong.

Since starting my consulting firm in 1976, I have learned that there are two key questions that can unlock the knowledge that is waiting to be discovered: • What is the dumbest thing your company is doing? • What is the most difficult or most time-consuming thing your company is doing? Once you open these doors, the company will be able to take advantage of amazing insights and great ideas. As I pointed out in section I, line people know the

O MAN! Offer Thy labyrinthine longings into a monotheistic bonfire consecrated to the unparalleled God. Burn desire for human affection in the fire of aspiration for GOD alone, a love solitary because omnipresent! Throw faggot of ignorance to incandesce the blaze of insight! Devour all sorrows in the sorrow for God's absence. Consume all regrets in meditative bliss!

experiencing shopping as a consumer would. Nothing else would have worked without those insights. Second, Clay Street is about building a team totally driven by the

Here are the types of questions I consider asking during product analysis: What is the nature of the product? (What are its benefits? Why would someone buy it?) Is it a commodity good or a unique good? (Could the company increase differentiation?) Are there any complementary goods? (Can the company piggyback off growth in complements or near complements?) Are there any substitutes? (Is the company vulnerable to indirect competitors, namely substitutes?) What is the product’s life cycle? (Is it new or almost obsolete?) How is it packaged? (This is an optional question. Is anything bundled or included with the product—for example, just a razor versus a razor with replacement blades, or just a product versus a product with a service contract? Would a change in the product’s packaging make the product more likely to meet specific consumer segments’ needs?) If you selectively ask questions about these product-related topics, you can uncover insights that will help you refine your hypotheses and ultimately serve your client more effectively.

Promotion stocks came to the retailer ahead of the rest of the market. Also, they usually got an extra lot even after the end of the promotion Newly launched products came to the retailer first. The customers got more choice, faster, leading to favourable word-of-mouth publicity Local display and consumer sampling budgets were always directed liberally at the retailer Vendors ensured that no slow moving inventory was stuck in the retailer’s stores; they wanted nothing to choke the pipeline The retailer also received the best in-class margin from the distributor If some items were in short supply, the vendor would ensure the retailer was the last one to go out of stock In effect, the consumers found more products, fresher stocks and more promotions in the retailer’s stores compared to the general market. This wasn’t something actively created by either the vendors or the retailer, but was a byproduct of good trading practices. Just one move based on a trading community insight— everyone has less money in the bank than needed — hurled the retailer into a virtuous growth cycle, with all the vendors pushing in one direction, with them. Most people in the business would not give a second look at changing these trading practices. If the payment norm is eight days why modify it? Surely the wholesalers, too, know what they’re letting themselves in for? And the vast volumes offered by organised retail should offset the stress of extending credit. Isn’t that how it works? One retailer managed to peep behind the curtain of wholesaler business practices and understood what a boon more money in the bank was to the trade. And look at the gains they reaped for this seemingly insignificant insight!

This is my self-assessment that I wrote in my performance review that year: Overall, my performance was dreadful in 2006. In Unbox, our launch was poorly received, partly due to DRM [digital rights management] and licensing issues that restrict content usage, and selection, partly due to bad product choices we made for consumers (erring on the side of quality over download speed) and partly due to engineering defects. In any case, I didn’t manage these issues appropriately and the result was a weak launch with weak consumer response and negative press reaction. Net my performance versus goals can be summarized by a poor execution percentage in terms of projects completed and the main project that is complete (Unbox Video) is not a compelling customer experience (yet) and the rate of sales is pitiful. I think a grade of ‘D’ for my performance vs. goals would be generous.

Bret: [There is a] distinction between the satisfaction of life coming from consuming, which is inherently empty, versus producing. Producing doesn't necessarily have to mean [producing] stuff. It can be [producing] meaning or insight or any one of a number of other things. [...] Heather: Recognising the long-term glow that you get from producing something of lasting value and beauty and meaning in the world, as opposed to only being exposed to [producing] short-term stuff. [...] Coming to know a craftsman who really builds things with care and knowledge with the intention that you will be able to pass this on to your children or your friends or whomever later on. This is a piece with lasting beauty; with lasting function, that was built with someone who knew something about the wood or the metals or whatever the materials are. This is a way into finding the kinds of meaning that a fourth frontier mentality can provide.

Ravi Dhar, professor at Yale University and the director of its Center for Customer Insights, is right when he says, “Most marketers assume that consumers are rational agents who weigh each option carefully considering all possible trade-offs, whereas in practice choices emerge out of intuitive processing that makes some option look more attractive than others.

Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Evidence shows that’s distinct from how much you believe in your methods. You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence. We become blinded by arrogance when we’re utterly convinced of our strengths and our strategies. We get paralyzed by doubt when we lack conviction in both. We can be consumed by an inferiority complex when we know the right method but feel uncertain about our ability to execute it. What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

Stopping, calming and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, we will continue on the course of destruction caused by unmindful consumption. To attain well-being, we need to take care not only of our bodies but also of our minds. Mindfulness practice is central to seeing the interdependence of mind and body. Learning to mindfully consume sensory impressions can help us reduce our craving, anger, fear, sadness and stress. Desire is a kind of food that nourishes us and gives us energy. If we have a healthy desire, such as a wish to save or protect life, care for our environment or live a simple, balanced life with time to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, our desire will bring us happiness. If we allow anger to come up in our mind consciousness and stay for a whole hour, for that whole hour we are eating anger. The more we eat anger, the more the seed of anger in our store consciousness grows. If you have a friend who understands you well and offers you words of comfort and kindness, the seed of loving-kindness will arise in your mind consciousness. We must learn to nurture wholesome seeds and to tame unwholesome ones with mindfulness, because when they return to the store consciousness, they become stronger regardless of their nature. When we water seeds of forgiveness, acceptance and happiness in the people we love, we are giving them very healthy food for their consciousness. But if we constantly water the seeds of hatred, craving and anger in our loved ones, we are poisoning them. We must find the source of our desire to eat too much of the wrong foods. Perhaps we eat out of sadness; perhaps we eat out of our fears for the future. If we cut the sources of nutriment for our sadness and fear, sadness and fear will wither and weaken and with them the urge to overeat. The Buddha said that if we know how to look deeply into our suffering and recognize its source of food, we are already on the path of emancipation. The way out of our suffering if through mindfulness of consumption - all forms of consumption and not just edible foods and drinks. When we pause with mindfulness, we recognize that our family member must be suffering somehow. If one is happy and peaceful, one would not behave with such anger. Mindfulness practice can help reveal this kind of insight. We should avoid associating with individuals and groups of people who do not know how to recognize, embrace and transform their energy of hate, discrimination or anger. In order to have the strength and energy to embrace painful feelings, we must nourish our positive feelings regularly. We should learn to treat our unpleasant feelings as friends who can teach us a great deal. Just like a mindfulness bell, unpleasant feelings draw our attention to issues and situations in our lives that ar enot working and that need our care. Proceeding with mindful observation, we will gain insight and understanding into what needs to be changed and how to change it.

The biggest missed opportunity in development is that organizations don’t think about their customers as valuable, productive assets in the delivery of a service, but as anonymous consumers of products.

As we continued to meet with Jeff, we tried various kinds of spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides to present and explore our ideas, none of which seemed to be particularly effective. At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, Jeff suggested a different approach for the next meeting. Forget the spreadsheets and slides, he said. Instead, each team member would write a narrative document. In it, they would describe their best idea for a device or service for the digital media business. The next meeting arrived, and we all showed up with our narratives. (As mentioned, ours was one of several teams involved in the early experimentation with narratives at the company. They were not yet official Amazon policy.) We distributed them and read them to ourselves and then discussed them, one after another. One proposed an e-book reader that would use new E Ink screen technology. Another described a new take on the MP3 player. Jeff wrote his own narrative about a device he called the Amazon Puck. It would sit on your countertop and could respond to voice commands like, “Puck. Please order a gallon of milk.” Puck would then place the order with Amazon. The great revelation of this process was not any one of the product ideas. As we’ve described in chapter four, the breakthrough was the document itself. We had freed ourselves of the quantitative demands of Excel, the visual seduction of PowerPoint, and the distracting effect of personal performance. The idea had to be in the writing. Writing up our ideas was hard work. It required us to be thorough and precise. We had to describe features, pricing, how the service would work, why consumers would want it. Half-baked thinking was harder to disguise on the written page than in PowerPoint slides. It could not be glossed over through personal charm in the presentation. After we started using the documents, our meetings changed. There was more meat and more detail to discuss, so the sessions were livelier and longer. We weren’t so focused on the pro forma P&L and projected market segment share. We talked at length about the service itself, the experience, and which products and services we thought would appeal most to the customer.

Economics and P&L What are the per-unit economics of the device? That is, what is the expected gross profit and contribution profit per unit? What is the rationale for the price point you have chosen for the product? How much will we have to invest up front to build this product in terms of people, technology, inventory, warehouse space, and so on? For this section of the PR/FAQ, ideally one or more members of your finance team will work with you to understand and capture these costs so you can include a simplified table of the per-unit economics and a mini P&L in the document. A resourceful entrepreneur or product manager can do this work themselves if they do not have a finance manager or team. For new products, the up-front investment is a major consideration. In the case of Melinda, there is a requirement for 77 people to work on the hardware and software, for an annualized cost of roughly $15 million. This means that the product idea needs to have the potential to earn well in excess of $15 million per year in gross profit to be worth building. The consumer questions and economic analysis both have an effect on the product price point, and that price point, in turn, has an effect on the size of the total addressable market. Price is a key variable in the authoring of your PR/FAQ. There may be special assumptions or considerations that have informed your calculation of the price point—perhaps making it relatively low or unexpectedly high—that need to be called out and explained. Some of the best new product proposals set a not-to-exceed price point because it forces the team to innovate within that constraint and face the tough trade-offs early on. The problem(s) associated with achieving that price point should be fully explained and explored in the FAQ.

AI enables marketers to: •​Accelerate revenue growth •​Create personalized consumer experiences at scale •​Drive costs down •​Generate greater return on investment (ROI) •​Get more actionable insights from marketing data •​Predict consumer needs and behaviors with greater accuracy •​Reduce time spent on repetitive, data-driven tasks •​Shorten the sales cycle •​Unlock greater value from marketing technologies

One way to understand what it means to restructure our relationship to the world is to foreground the fact that how we fantasmatically conceptualize the world—what Lacan describes as our imaginary relationship to the world—may not have a whole lot to do with how the world actually is. This implies that if we are to begin to live in the world in more creative and ethically responsible ways, we need to learn to recognize the world as separate from our fantasies; we need to learn to respect the integrity of the world apart from our projections and unconscious distortions. In concrete terms, this might mean that we need to learn to treat other human beings as entities that have identities, desires, opinions, and patterns of being that are entirely independent of us. This in turn requires that we tolerate a degree of separation from others—that we recognize that others possess the kind of poignant singularity that has nothing whatsoever to do with our needs, wishes, or fantasized fulfillment. As a matter of fact, it may well be that it is only insofar as we internalize this insight that we become capable of genuine relationships—relationships that do not endeavor to consume the other or to reduce it to a narcissistic mirror for the self but that, rather, allow the other to persist as an autonomous entity.

Here’s how NPI worked: Once every quarter, teams submitted projects they thought were worth doing that would require resources from outside their own team—which basically meant almost every project of reasonable size. It took quite a bit of work to prepare and submit an NPI request. You needed a “one-pager”; a written summary of the idea; an initial rough estimate of which teams would be impacted; a consumer adoption model, if applicable; a P&L; and an explanation of why it was strategically important for Amazon to embark on the initiative immediately. Just proposing the idea represented a resource-intensive undertaking.

The other key is frugality. You can’t afford to pursue inventions for very long if you spend your money on things that don’t lead to a better customer experience, like trade show booths, big teams, and splashy marketing campaigns. Amazon Music and Prime Video are examples of how we kept our investment manageable for many years by being frugal: keeping the team small, staying focused on improving the customer experience, limiting our marketing spend, and managing the P&L carefully. Once we had a clear product plan and vision for how these products could become billion-dollar businesses that would delight tens, even hundreds of millions of consumers, we invested big. Patience and carefully managed investment over many years can pay off greatly.

Big market ripe for disruption. You have identified a large mainstream consumer purchase and process that is inconvenient or unpleasant, and it is associated with a product that has long margins that will give you plenty of funding for both reducing prices and building a brand. 2.   Unfair advantage. You have conceived of a company position and customer acquisition strategy that will take the company from 0 to 60 because you have unique insight and ability to execute on that vision, or you have direct access to deep pockets of capital, technologies, influencers, or experts who can make your product a compelling and newsworthy breakthrough. 3.   Total experience. You have thought out the entire end-to-end consumer experience and can specifically identify how your company will radically improve over the current experience. You are capable of executing that experience from Day One. 4.   Digital savvy to scale. Your founding team has deep experience in harnessing the Internet for customer acquisition, and you have a clear sense of what digital strategy and channels you will prioritize.

Greatness, in so many ways, is determined by whether you persist through failure or let it consume you.

but still invites them to go through the interview loop, hoping that this will assist in the hiring decision. This is a mistake. In most cases, the questionable candidate will not get the job, and a lot of time will have been wasted in the process. The hiring manager should not bring a candidate in for the time-consuming and expensive interview loop unless they are inclined to hire them after the phone interview.

Nations do not exist in isolation. Peoples have always roamed the globe in search of different opportunities. Nations principally trade to expand their consumption possibilities. In a world where we produce to consume, receiving goods and services is better in material terms than sending them elsewhere.

One way to understand what it means to restructure our relationship to the world is to foreground the fact that how we fantasmatically conceptualize the world—what Lacan describes as our imaginary relationship to the world—may not have a whole lot to do with how the world actually is. This implies that if we are to begin to live in the world in more creative and ethically responsible ways, we need to learn to recognize the world as separate from our fantasies; we need to learn to respect the integrity of the world apart from our projections and unconscious distortions. In concrete terms, this might mean that we need to learn to treat other human beings as entities that have identities, desires, opinions, and patterns of being that are entirely independent of us. This in turn requires that we tolerate a degree of separation from others—that we recognize that others possess the kind of poignant singularity that has nothing whatsoever to do with our needs, wishes, or fantasized fulfillment. As a matter of fact, it may well be that it is only insofar as we internalize this insight that we become capable of genuine relationships—relationships that do not endeavor to consume the other or to reduce it to a narcissistic mirror for the self but that, rather, allow the other to persist as an autonomous entity.

The great revelation of this process was not any one of the product ideas. As we’ve described in chapter four, the breakthrough was the document itself. We had freed ourselves of the quantitative demands of Excel, the visual seduction of PowerPoint, and the distracting effect of personal performance. The idea had to be in the writing. Writing up our ideas was hard work. It required us to be thorough and precise. We had to describe features, pricing, how the service would work, why consumers would want it. Half-baked thinking was harder to disguise on the written page than in PowerPoint slides. It could not be glossed over through personal charm in the presentation.

Along the way to Seattle, he wrote his business plan. He identified several reasons why the book category was underserved and well suited to online commerce. He outlined how he could create a new and compelling experience for book-buying customers. To begin with, books were relatively lightweight and came in fairly uniform sizes, meaning they would be easy and inexpensive to warehouse, pack, and ship. Second, while more than 100 million books had been written and more than a million titles were in print in 1994, even a Barnes & Noble mega-bookstore could stock only tens of thousands of titles. An online bookstore, on the other hand, could offer not just the books that could fit in a brick-and-mortar store but any book in print. Third, there were two large book-distribution companies, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, that acted as intermediaries between publishers and retailers and maintained huge inventories in vast warehouses. They kept detailed electronic catalogs of books in print to make it easy for bookstores and libraries to order from them. Jeff realized that he could combine the infrastructure that Ingram and Baker & Taylor had created—warehouses full of books ready to be shipped, plus an electronic catalog of those books—with the growing infrastructure of the Web, making it possible for consumers to find and buy any book in print and get it shipped directly to their homes. Finally, the site could use technology to analyze the behavior of customers and create a unique, personalized experience for each one of them.

He explained to Steve that there was an important difference in the digital media value chain as well. In physical retail, Amazon operated at the middle of the value chain. We added value by sourcing and aggregating a vast selection of goods, tens of millions of them, on a single website and delivering them quickly and cheaply to customers. To win in digital, because those physical retail value adds were not advantages, we needed to identify other parts of the value chain where we could differentiate and serve customers well. Jeff told Steve that this meant moving out of the middle and venturing to either end of the value chain. On one end was content, where the value creators were book authors, filmmakers, TV producers, publishers, musicians, record companies, and movie studios. On the other end was distribution and consumption of content. In digital, that meant focusing on applications and devices consumers used to read, watch, or listen to content, as Apple had already done with iTunes and the iPod. We all took note of what Apple had achieved in digital music in a short period of time and sought to apply those learnings to our long-term product vision.

They called me Mad Red for a time,’ Master Uskore continued, as if Maynard had never spoken. ‘In my youth, due to my propensity to overindulge in research and experiment, but what I yielded from those years was unprecedented, and the insight I gained into our world is unparalleled. I was only able to achieve such grandeur by applying the tools of the Detector. True, we live on these platforms and we know much of their mechanics, but why? Where does Dust come from? What was the ground before—was there a before? These questions, Virgil.’ Master Uskore stepped forward. His eyes widened, red at the edges. ‘We will discover the truth. No matter the cost. And you will learn how, and you will help us. You must, for knowledge is all that separates us from… Knowledge is alive. It is a fire. Fire is not evil, by itself, but how it is applied may cause great harm. Or, great joy. It is ours to recover. You must learn this discipline or be consumed by the fire itself.

Horizontal expertise paints on a far-reaching canvas. Say that you are an expert known worldwide for helping CEOs manage change in disruptive environments. Your expertise doesn’t come from understanding a vertical industry, like mining or media or consumer electronics or transportation. You just need to be sufficiently sharp to learn enough about a given industry to know how to apply your expertise in a given setting. In effect, you can work with any viable CEO candidate who wants to learn — regardless of the industry — as long as the primary challenges are defined horizontally, such as navigating deep change in the middle of disruption. Today you’re working with C-level executives at Samsung after their phones are banned on all airline flights, but next month you might be working with an executive in the hospitality industry facing a hotel worker strike. Or health insurance executives navigating an uncertain landscape that can never really see farther than two years. Each of these engagements is interesting because you have to apply your expertise to a new setting. But as much as you are learning, you’re taking two steps back for every three steps forward because much of what you learn with each new engagement is just the bare necessity in order to even be relevant. It’s interesting but challenging. Thrilling but exhausting. Engaging but distracting. There are cases, of course, where new clients regard your broad expertise as a significant selling point. They like that you can apply consumer insights to a professional B2B setting, or that you can help apply change management to consumer engagement. The first advantage of horizontal expertise, then, is how the application of expertise to many verticals always keeps the expert engaged and learning.

Before Entry Read internal and external perspectives on the market and consumers. You won’t become an expert, but that’s OK; awareness is what you’re after. Identify local consultants who can brief you on the state of the market and the competitive environment. Learn the language—it’s not about fluency; it’s about respect. Develop some hypotheses about the business situation you are entering. – Use the STARS model to talk with your new boss and other stakeholders about the situation. – Assess the leadership team—is it functioning well, and does it comprise a good mix of new and veteran, or local and expatriate, talent? – Assess the overall organization using any available corporate performance and talent-pool data. – If possible, talk to some team members to gather their insights and test some of your early hypotheses. After Entry Your first day, first week, and first month are absolutely critical. Without the following four-phase plan, you risk getting drawn into fighting fires rather than proactively leading change. Diagnose the situation and align the leadership team around some early priorities. Establish strategic direction and align the organization around it. Repair critical processes and strive for execution consistency. Develop local leadership talent to lay the foundation for your eventual exit.

In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these “winner-take-all” markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with “imperfect substitution,” which Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best.

Way back in 1971 Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning social scientist, observed, “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.

The Power and Promise of a Customer Service Call Center: An Insight into Global Sky In the contemporary business landscape, one cannot underscore the significance of stellar customer service. It's not just about selling products or offering services – it's about building lasting relationships. Enter the world of call centers, where conversations bridge the divide between businesses and consumers. Among the leading players in this arena, Global Sky emerges as a beacon of excellence. Let's delve deeper into the essence of what makes the Global Sky customer service call center stand out.

Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton—well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serves it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not “preaching,” for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.

The period of disarray I lived through in the run-up to those choices is typical of the chaos that so often confronts women during menopause. At this time of our life, one way or another, and whether we choose eventually to go with its flow or insist on resisting its tide, chaos is going to come knocking at our door. As someone with an unreasonable need for control over my own life, I’ve always feared chaos; but chaos, it seems, was precisely what I needed in order to break free. Insight into the strong medicine that chaos brings comes from the word’s origins: it is derived from the Greek khaos, referring to the void which was said to exist before the cosmos was created. Chaos, then, contains the seeds of new life, the seething potential out of which an entirely new universe might be born. As Nietzsche said, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”14 Chaos is the beauty of uncertainty; it unbinds us so that it can create us anew. In his book Timaeus, Plato declared in this context that chaos also incorporates the concept of chora: it is “a receptacle of all becoming — its wetnurse, as it were.” For me, this time was nothing if not a time of becoming. An old story had been consumed, and the ingredients for a new story were just beginning to assemble in the mixing bowl.

How Digital Marketers Utilize the Power of ChatGPT The power of ChatGPT has revolutionized how digital marketers interact with their audience. It’s an incredibly versatile tool allowing personalized and interactive conversations, providing valuable insights into consumer behavior and preferences. Therfore, by leveraging ChatGPT meaning, digital marketers can engage with their target audience more meaningfully and tailor, leading to enhanced customer experiences and increased conversions. At Comstat Solutions, we understand the value of leveraging cutting-edge technologies like ChatGPT to drive results for your business. As a growing digital marketing agency, we specialize in harnessing the power of AI-driven solutions to optimize your marketing efforts.

Saad Jalal Toronto Canada - The Science of Healthy Eating Healthy eating is not just a trend; it's a science that holds the key to a longer, more vibrant life. The choices we make when it comes to food have a profound impact on our overall well-being, from our physical health to our mental clarity. Understanding the science behind healthy eating empowers us to make informed choices and lead healthier lives. At its core, healthy eating is about nourishing our bodies with the right balance of nutrients. This means consuming a variety of foods rich in vitamins, minerals, fiber, proteins, and healthy fats. The science shows that such a diet can: Saad Jalal Promote Physical Health: Nutrient-dense foods provide essential vitamins and minerals that support bodily functions. They can help prevent chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. Boost Mental Health: A well-balanced diet can positively impact mood and cognitive function. Nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants found in certain foods have been linked to improved mental well-being. Sustain Energy: Healthy eating provides a steady supply of energy throughout the day, avoiding energy crashes and fatigue. Saad Jalal Toronto Canada said Complex carbohydrates, lean proteins, and healthy fats are key players in this process. Support Digestive Health: Foods rich in fiber promote healthy digestion and regular bowel movements. They maintain gut health and contribute to a strong immune system. Maintain Healthy Weight: Portion control and balanced nutrition are fundamental to weight management. Eating mindfully and recognizing hunger cues can help control calorie intake. The science of healthy eating is an evolving field, continually revealing new insights into the connection between diet and well-being. By staying informed and making conscientious choices, we can harness this knowledge to lead healthier, happier lives. So, let's embrace the science of healthy eating and make every meal a step towards a brighter, healthier future.

Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live. For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labour as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption. Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns of Iowa to be our neighbours, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties.

Best Tips for a Stress-Free Pregnancy – Motherhood Chaitanya Hospital Bringing a new life into the world is an extraordinary journey, one filled with anticipation and joy. Yet, the path to motherhood can also be fraught with stress and anxiety. The good news is that there are ways to navigate this period with greater ease. From seeking support through childbirth and parenting classes in Chandigarh to embracing the serenity of Pre-Natal Yoga Classes for Pregnant Mothers in Chandigarh, let’s explore some of the best tips for a stress-free pregnancy. Understand Your Body Pregnancy is a unique and transformative experience, but it also brings a host of physical changes. Understanding these changes can alleviate anxiety. Remember, your body is doing something miraculous. It’s nurturing and growing a new life. Embrace the journey with wonder and gratitude. Stay Active with Pre-Natal Yoga Pre-Natal Yoga Classes in Chandigarh provide an exceptional avenue to connect with your body and your baby. Yoga helps maintain flexibility, ease discomfort, and reduce stress. The gentle stretches and mindful breathing techniques impart a sense of calm and inner peace. Educate Yourself Knowledge is power, and when it comes to pregnancy, it’s empowering. Enroll in childbirth and parenting classes in Chandigarh to gain insight into what to expect during labor, delivery, and early parenthood. Knowing what lies ahead can significantly reduce apprehension. Nurture Emotional Well-being Pregnancy is not just about physical health; emotional well-being is equally vital. Seek emotional support from your partner, friends, or a counselor if needed. Express your feelings and allow yourself to experience a range of emotions without judgment. Eat Mindfully Nutrition is crucial for both you and your baby. Consume a balanced diet rich in essential nutrients. Remember, you’re not eating for two adults; you’re providing the building blocks for a new life. Consult with a healthcare professional for dietary guidance. Stay Hydrated Hydration is key to a healthy pregnancy. It helps prevent common issues like constipation and urinary tract infections. Aim for at least eight glasses of water a day, and adjust your intake as needed to accommodate your changing body.

Humility is often misunderstood. It’s not a matter of having low self-confidence. One of the Latin roots of humility means “from the earth.” It’s about being grounded—recognizing that we’re flawed and fallible. Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Evidence shows that’s distinct from how much you believe in your methods. You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence. We become blinded by arrogance when we’re utterly convinced of our strengths and our strategies. We get paralyzed by doubt when we lack conviction in both. We can be consumed by an inferiority complex when we know the right method but feel uncertain about our ability to execute it. What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

When one thinks about the last mile and listens to stories from consumers and citizens who have not had a great experience there, one realizes that it is not the big things that matter. It is the small things that matter. At the last mile, little things like the manner in which a decision was presented, the ambiance of the room, the phrasing of the question that people were asked, the color of the paper on which a form was printed, or the pleasantness of the agent with whom the consumer interacted are all determinants of the decision to buy products, open accounts, or, more generally, consume services. As

Vision mission: What was the original market or technology insight that led you to create this company? Customers: Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it? Problem statement: What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers? Use cases: What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem? Product/solution: Give a detailed explanation of the technology behind the solution—what does it do now, and what else is it capable of doing? Ecosystem: In many cases there are other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value. These companies form an ecosystem around the problem and solution. What are all the companies and where in the ecosystem are the control points where one company has leverage? Competition: Who else is trying to solve this problem—or, if no one else sees the problem yet, who might jump in to compete with you to solve the problem once you identify it? Business model: How will your product or service change business for your customers? Will it increase their return on investment or reduce costs in a significant way? Or does it allow them to do something that couldn’t have been done with prior technology, creating huge value? Sales and go-to-market: Enterprise companies should articulate how the product or solution will make its way to the market. Through a sales force? Through distribution partners? Both? For a consumer company, how will users find out about your solution? From app stores? Search? Viral adoption? Growth hacking techniques? Advertising? PR? Organization: How is the company organized? Who are the major influencers on the company? How are decisions made? What kind of culture will work? Funding strategy: What’s the next funding event? A private financing? An IPO? How much runway does the company have before it needs more money and what kind of funding is in place to execute against the category strategy?

ABOUT MATIYAS We are an enthusiastic and energetic establishment dedicated to bringing automation and transforming business processes digitally. We understand the value of technological advancements for increasing productivity and enhancing quality, and our in-house teams of dedicated professionals offer various services to achieve this objective effectively. Matiyas digital solutions help to streamline manufacturing business functions, increase profitability, automating efforts and increase the quality of production. Our Customized manufacturing digital solutions can assist you to address all the hurdles that occur during the manufacturing process. You can have complete control over the manufacturing process by handling inventory management and supply chain management effectively. At Matiyas, we are committed to bringing digital transformation in manufacturing through advanced solutions and excellent services Matiyas is providing industry 4.0 digital solutions to: • Oil & Gas • Cement Manufacturing • Electronics Manufacturing • Industrial Machinery and Equipment • Steel Manufacturing • Plastic Manufacturing • Packaging Manufacturing • Power Plants • Pharmaceutical • Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) • Medical Devices Industry • EPC Our digital solutions empower the manufacturers to closely supervise each and every stage of the manufacturing process and gives the absolute control over it, as a result you observe an ample reduction in wastage and material exchange possibilities which not only improves production quality but quantity too. We understand the major problems manufacturing businesses come across and we tailor best manufacturing digital solutions accordingly. HOW OUR MANUFACTURING DIGITAL SOLUTIONS CAN BENEFIT YOUR ORGANIZATION? Increased ROI Reduced Operational Costs & Optimize Operations Enhanced Resource Utilization & Reduced Overheads Deeper insights about your supply chains & production Improved Agility, Higher productivity Easier Collaboration Accountability and transparency And Many More .... Matiyas Digital Solutions: Inventory Management, Procurement Management, Selling Management, Production Management, Retail POS Management, Manufacturing Management, Project Management, Customer Relationship Management, Accounting & Finance Management, Human Capital Management, Assets Management, Quality Management, Ecommerce, Website, Hospital Management Information System HMIS, Education Management and many more… Matiyas Offices: India, Oman, Kuwait, Canada, UAE, Armenia, Africa, Egypt Interested to Automate and Collaborate Effectively Through Our Custom Digital Solutions?

At one point, we weren’t as disciplined about our where-to-play choices. It was everywhere anybody needed consumer insight or anywhere we thought it could add value. Just like a business dilutes its focus and in turn its growth potential when you try to do too many things at a time or do things that are further away from your core strengths, we were relatively diluted in the nature of the impact we could have.”4

You needed a “one-pager”; a written summary of the idea; an initial rough estimate of which teams would be impacted; a consumer adoption model, if applicable; a P&L; and an explanation of why it was strategically important for Amazon to embark on the initiative immediately.

better customer experience, like trade show booths, big teams, and splashy marketing campaigns. Amazon Music and Prime Video are examples of how we kept our investment manageable for many years by being frugal: keeping the team small, staying focused on improving the customer experience, limiting our marketing spend, and managing the P&L carefully. Once we had a clear product plan and vision for how these products could become billion-dollar businesses that would delight tens, even hundreds of millions of consumers, we invested big. Patience and carefully managed investment over many years can pay off greatly. Invention

Fear inhibits learning. Research in neuroscience shows that fear consumes physiologic resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving.15 This is why it's hard for people to do their best work when they are afraid.

But in the beginning, we can use the teaching, the notion of impermanence, as an instrument to help bring about the insight of impermanence. It’s like a match and a flame. The match is not the flame, but the match can bring about the flame. And when we have the flame, the flame will consume the match. When we have the insight, the insight will burn away the notion. What we need for our liberation is the insight of impermanence.

minimum viable ecosystem (MVE) means something else. It is not targeted at exploring consumer demand. Rather, it is targeted at aligning the partners that you need to build your value architecture and to deliver your value proposition (which, to be sure, itself must be selected on the basis of deep customer insight). The MVE is less about prototyping and more about attracting and aligning. It provides the foundation that you can use to attract an initial subset of partners, which serves to attract the second subset, then the third, and so on.

around one thousand minutes. Urban represented these as one hundred ten-minute blocks. “Throughout the day, you spend ten minutes of your life on each block, until you eventually run out of blocks and it’s time to go to sleep,” he writes. Placing the blocks into a ten-by-ten grid, we can then label each to gain insight into how we are spending them. “How many of them are put toward making your future better, and how many of them are just there to be enjoyed?” Urban asks. “How many of them are spent with other people, and how many are for time by yourself? How many are used to create something, and how many are used to consume something? How many of the blocks are focused on your body, how

We are in danger of becoming a generation of plugged-in, look-it-uppers who are more ready to take things at face value and less willing to inquire or explore. More satisfied with proof and less open to discovery. More inclined to consume rather than create. More fearful of uncertainty than open to possibility.