Derek Jeter on Leadership...

I recently had the opportunity to ask Derek Jeter about leadership. After 13 years with the New York Yankees, and one of the greatest baseball players of all time, you’ll hear Derek Jeter quotes on winning and leadership. His number one piece of advice during the interview, “practice what you...

Don’t let anyone else influence yo...

Credit: sizumaru Flickr Photostream Every day we ask our 4 year old how was school. Often times it is good, but just as often we hear some bad stuff as well. Like, “we only read books once in a while.” And one time she came home and told us she had to sit in the class room while all of her friends played outside “the entire time.” As you can imagine, we were very concerned as parents. Over the course of a month and a half, we became so frustrated with the school and lack of academic focus (and I’m talking ABC’s here), that we began...

Are you selling Green Eggs and Ham?...

I’m sitting on the subway today tired of carrying around a book and a dozen printed out white papers and realized I need a Kindle or an iPad.   Then it hit me. I would pay for eBooks Sam I Am.  But why is that? Why would I pay for an eBook, but not so much for music or movies?  Why is my perceived value of a book so much greater than that of music or a movie? As long as I can remember, price is driven by 2 things.  The cost plus profit margin along with supply and demand. Because supply is essentially unlimited online, you set price based on demand.  The...

New Direction with Fresh Perspectives...

Credit: Shahram Sharif photostream Much of the content on this blog has been influenced by my work and experiences at IQPC with a focus on social media marketing within the events industry.  As of Monday I will be embarking on a new chapter in my career as the Vice President of Marketing for AxialMarket. AxialMarket, is the world’s first business investment marketplace where qualified buyers and sellers of privately held companies can confidentially, efficiently, and securely discover, engage and close private transactions. Essentially, our platform connects active...

My Foursquare Experiment...

Credit: dpstyles™'s Flickr photostream I recently upgraded to the HTC Incredible Android phone on Verizon. With that came a flurry of new online activity for me (just isn’t the same on a Blackberry). One of those is Foursquare.  I enjoy sharing professionally, which includes blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but am more reluctant when it comes to my personal life.  Foursquare has much more personal application for me than professional, so I was definitely stepping out of my social media comfort zone. I believe location based services such as...

The Marketing Sandpile...

In reading The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo, one of the central themes of this book is Per Bak’s Sandpile effect. In an overly simplified explanation, the sandpile effect draws an analogy between the unmappable and invisible interconnections between global events and the complex relationship between individual grains of sand as they are piled on top of each other.  Each time a grain is added to the pile, the relationship between each grain is altered.  The experiment tries to determine how many grains will it take before the sandpile collapses. ...

IQPC’s Exchange Group Wins Award...

Normally I wouldn’t self promote my own company, but my last couple posts discuss creating disruptive technologies and challenging yourself and your business. One of our divisions at IQPC is the IQPC Exchange group. This is a very specialized division offering invite only executive networking events.  In early July, they attended the Conference Awards were Corporate Counsel Exchange™ shortlisted for ‘Best Networking Event’. I am happy to report that they won the award in this category with competition from Informa Life Sciences and Glasgows.  Features of the...

5 Steps to Finding Your Disruptive Force...

The Your customers are wrong post gives a brief overview on how your customers are wrong, and what I mean is essentially, they just don’t know what solutions exist to solve their problems. They will just ask you for an incremental improvement to what they currently use to solve their current problem. Below (in an overly simplified manner) I’d like to outline some of the steps I would take to try and identify some needs and what to do about it. First off, you can’t do anything without knowing your customers.  And I mean truly know them to the point where...

When your customers are wrong...

Credit: Beverly & Pack's Flickr Photostream Now we’ve all heard your customers are always right. Well, sometimes, your customers are just plain old wrong.  Sometimes, your customers just don’t know what they want.  Don’t try to use this as an excuse to force your product, service, or event down your customers’ throats, but as an opportunity to give your customers what they really want. Sometimes, your customer just doesn’t know what’s out there and what’s good for them.  They don’t know what possibilities exist to...

5 Ways To Make Your Members Feel at Home...

Christopher Uschan of Omnipress and the main force behind Engage365.org, an online community for using social media at events, wrote a great post outlining 5 ways to introduce new members to your online community.  Many of us that run online communities often times forget about some of the basics.  And one of the reasons this post caught my attention is David Meerman Scott makes the analogy that the internet is like a city, and social media sites (among many others in his analogy) are like bars or cocktail parties.  Christopher’s post dives a bit deeper into the...