Episodes

The buzz: The Electric Slide. News flash for Utilities: You can no longer be profitable on a one-sided business model providing power to customers. Enter the prosumer. While the consumer is utility-dependent and generates revenues, the prosumer and utility are interdependent. The utility needs the prosumer’s commitment to reduce electricity use or supply it to the grid at specified times, and the prosumer needs the utility’s kilowatts and gets a new omni-channel experience. The experts speak. Ro...

The buzz: “Change is the law of life…those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future” -JFKennedy. The term “digital transformation” is ubiquitous, but what does it really mean? Easy answer: software and technology adoption. Not! Digital transformation is about changing everything else – business activities, models, activities, processes, competencies, organizations, operations. It requires deeper thought about strategic topics, plus even deeper commitment to adopt, inno...

The buzz: 'The unicorn is noble' -German folk song. Wow! Companies led by EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winners are among the most successful in the world, generating 3T dollars in revenue, creating 13M jobs, outperforming the US market in stock returns and longevity. The majority go public at 300 percent the rate of US private companies. How did EY identify these 'unicorns'? What entrepreneurial lessons can your company learn from them about managing risk, finding talent, balancing growth with so...

The buzz: 'I’m gonna tell Mom on you.' Women remain under-represented in government, boards, C-suite and influential business roles, often due to unconscious bias. A man named John or David is more likely than a woman to be on a board. But the unintentional blame-and-shame messages in workplace diversity and inclusion programs often leave many men feeling excluded and alienated. How can we get past the gender-divide to value the entire workforce? The experts speak. Tinna C. Nielsen, Move The Ele...

The buzz: Mom, are we there yet? We’re seeing a ground-swell of policy and practice discussions and activities about the under-representation of women in the boardroom, C-suite and high-growth entrepreneurship. The Lean-In Revolution has brought men into the conversation and spurred women’s power networks. More venture capital firms, angel investment groups, and accelerator programs are aimed at female-founded high-growth startups. Have women in business arrived? The experts speak. Nicole Sahin,...

The buzz: 'Welcome to the future' -B. Paisley. Move over, 4th Industrial Revolution! Welcome to the 5th Industrial Revolution with intelligent robots, 3D-printed human organs, drones fetching warehouse orders, and driverless cars. Bhaskar Chakravorti describes it as 'the fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.' The experts speak. Jason Coffman, Deloitte Consulting: 'If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per h...

The buzz: “I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.” -Elizabeth Taylor. By 2019, cloud software delivery will grow to 112 Billion dolars –five times faster than traditional software– leveling the IT playing field. With uneasiness, skepticism and “technical acrophobia” about the cloud mostly a thing of the past, cloud adoption could grow from 22 percent today to 32 percent in the next 24 months. The main beneficiaries? Small and mid-sized businesses -SMBs. But should they still worry about reliabili...

The buzz: It’s NOT like “déjà vu all over again”! -Yogi Berra. Wake up call for the Chemical industry: Digital Transformation is real and more relevant than ever for your businesses. Reality check: Many of them still think of “digital” only as a way to improve manufacturing and supply chain. But today’s digital is a path to becoming more agile and productive, growing profitability and achieving sustainable competitiveness. The time has come for the industry to refocus your digital lens on the fu...

The buzz: Knock Knock! Futurist Edie Weiner coined the term ‘templosion’ to describe rapid and massive changes in increasingly shorter timeframes. As the templosive acceleration of digital transformation – Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Smart Machines – disrupts tech-laggard Finance, do they need a new business model to adopt and adapt? The experts speak. Sam Parikh, Deloitte: 'Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn' -S. Jobs. Jon E...

The buzz: Living for the City -Stevie Wonder, 1974-. Violent attacks in Florida, France, Texas and Turkey make public safety a top global concern. Can governments protect us in our homes, in public, at work and play? Tech advances in facial recognition, geo-fencing, streaming multi-source data analytics offer law enforcement and security organizations better awareness, sensing, detection and prediction across the public safety value chain. But must we choose between personal safety and data priv...

The buzz: Talk is not cheap! With dramatic workforce and business changes – multi-generations at work, gender inequity challenges, developing economies and globalization –it’s high time for the CHRO role to evolve. How? For starters, the CHRO can build transformational value-based relationships with HR supporting the business and strategies, engage permanent and external workers in new collaborations, use consumer-style tools and social HR to better engage the workforce, and more. Where to begin...

The buzz: The Gambler (K. Rogers). Business ownership can be a Coney Island rollercoaster. One moment, an exhilarating ride up; the next, a frightening plummet down. There are thousands of guidebooks, but no one has ever walked in your shoes with precisely your mix of talents, opportunities, and obstacles. How do you know “when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em?” if you don’t know what’s “normal” or how to solve the unique challenges of running your own business? The experts speak. Nina Kaufman, ...

The buzz: 'Takin’ Care of Business'. According to Forbes Magazine, 543,000 new businesses launch each month in the U.S. The catch: of the 28 million U.S. small businesses, 22.5 owners are self-employed, average 44,000 in annual revenue and have no employees. Is that the life you want now? Could you ever retire? Tune in for secrets -and not so secrets- to building a business that runs independently, instead of running your life. The experts speak. Nina Kaufman, Esq.: 'As an entrepreneur, you have...

The buzz: The Internet of Who (Whom)? The Internet was created in 1969 to facilitate the free flow of information. The IoT inherited this spirit. Fast forward to 2016. With cameras and emerging connected devices collecting and reporting data about our lives, it seems we’re designing the IoT to quantify and see ourselves clearly, like a virtual mirror. It’s time to take a step back and examine what this all means and whom it benefits now and in the future. What to call it? The “IoT of the Self”. ...

The buzz: Stressed? Join the crowd. 78% of employers in the 2013/14 Staying@Work™ Survey said stress is the #1 workforce risk. We have a solution: Radical Resiliency. But individuals, managers and senior executives face tough challenges in achieving it for themselves, their employees and their culture. How to overcome and prevail? The experts speak Eileen McDargh, The Resiliency Group: “It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘W...

The buzz: Show me the money? Our current financial world is rife with inefficiencies: cross-border payments take days and cost money, inter-bank funds are slow, accessing money is cumbersome, trading securities takes time. Hail, cryptocurrency! Bitcoin and blockchain were created to solve some of these challenges. How does it work? Should your business, your industry, and you personally adopt this new form of currency? What are the risks? The experts speak. Angus Champion de Crespigny, EY: “It's...

The buzz: “We just have a way of getting ourselves into hot water” (Carl Wilson, The Beach Boys). How Social Selling is conducted and how a brand is portrayed in social media – whether undertaken by the PR department, sales force or an individual worker in a large company, or by a small enterprise or a new start-up entrepreneur – can have big ramifications for the company, good and bad. If you’re not paying attention to the lurking pitfalls related to how you can contact prospects, what you can ...

The buzz: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” The key to a healthy population is more than an individual’s personal decisions and behaviors. Genetic science says the fault may be in our stars, after all. Can population-based wellness programs be equitable when our genes, cultures and environments make good health a stroll for some but an uphill battle for others? Is Big Data the new Big Brother? The experts speak. Dr. Paul Tunnah, pharmaphorum: “Risk comes fro...

Social Selling is real - now! How do we know? The numbers. Sales people not using social media missed quota 15 percent more often than peers who do 'Hubspot'.

The buzz: Boom! The speed of technological innovation is leading to a world of 'Templosion’: massive changes happening in increasingly compressed timeframes.

The buzz: Every day is a revolution. Welcome to the future. The upside: The 4th industrial Revolution’s smart factories, connected machines, and IIoT offer limitless possibilities for collaborative robotics, digital twins, and myriad “smart” use cases. At the heart of it all: the industrial machinery and components (IM&C) industry. The downside: Information overload and insufficient cybersecurity are barriers to capitalizing on the near-term estimated $15 trillion IIoT opportunity. Why you shoul...

The buzz: Knowledge is power. Reality check for utilities. Digitization and the exponential growth of mobile devices are changing your customer engagement. But still fewer than half of customers are digitally connected with their utility. Your challenge: If you’re not talking to your customer, they’re not listening to you. Solution: Rethink your customer engagement model. Reimagine your business models. Now! The experts speak. Jacqueline Robinson, DTE Energy: “You cannot look in a new direction ...

The buzz: WHY ME? Business ownership is tough, especially when clients push back on your pricing, employees act like four-year olds, vendors don’t deliver as promised. Add to that the fear of growing at a snail’s pace, while others soar. Is it possible to reclaim your power and use the law as a tool to strengthen your business foundation and relationships? “Yes!” say three legal experts. They’ll share legal pitfalls that many women—and men—entrepreneurs encounter, and how to sidestep them. Take ...

The buzz: What’s a vacation? Entrepreneurs and business owners have always carried the weight of their company, with precious few days off. Now pressure to “mind the store” is literally always-on, with digital customers online 24/7 from every device and location, 74% using social networks to make a buying decision and share experiences. How can small players use social selling, digital decision tools and ecommerce solutions – but retain their uniqueness – to compete with the “big kids”? The expe...