Book review: FinancialServiceLogic by Pekka Puustinen

Companies are increasingly striving to become more focused on customer needs and better serve their customers. After all, what is a company without customers? Yet, what exactly is the relationship between the company and the customer, and what should companies do in practice in order to truly provide service for their customers?

In his new book, FinancialServiceLogic: In the Revolution of Exchange in Banking and Insurance, Pekka Puustinen serves us as a guide on a path to a deeper understanding of the nature of exchange, the multiple dimensions of value created for all parties through interaction, and what it means to see your customers as human beings.

While the book focuses on the finance sector, the core tenets of the book are in no way limited to finance alone. The lessons from the book apply to any business, and the discussion is not so specific to finance that managers from other fields could not see how to apply it.

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The four stages of market-focused reinvention as a model for change leadership

Change is not easy. In a recent IBM study, less than half of change management programs were successful, and the bottom 20% of companies only succeeded 8% of the time. For any company hard at work implementing a change program, it is essential to also keep reflecting on what has been done and how to ensure that the program is steered in the right direction.

In this post, I will examine a change management framework from a recent book by Gregory S. Carpenter, Gary F. Gebhardt, and John F. Sherry Jr., all of whom are influencers from the Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. The book is called Resurgence: The four stages of market-focused reinvention.

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Manipulation of book review rankings at Amazon

Reviews have been one of Amazon’s strengths and one of its problems for a long time. The issues around fake reviews are rather well known and covered extensively in traditional media as well (here is a New York Times piece on those issues and Amazon’s attempts to solve them).

However, there is also another, less thoroughly covered story of Amazon review manipulation: the helpful or non-helpful review vote. Anyone can vote for or against a review with the simple click of a button, and this affects how reviews are displayed on the page. This feature is nowadays extensively used for manipulation of review rankings on product pages.

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Book review: Stellar Presentations

Shel Israel, the co-author of Naked Conversations and author of Twitterville, recently self-published his new book Stellar Presentations: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks.

Unlike his previous books, this one is not about social media, but instead about speaking in public with a special focus on how startups should present their products at conferences. Continue reading “Book review: Stellar Presentations”