In a recent post I suggested that Amazon, Apple, and Google are imminently trustable companies, appearing always to put their customers' interests first when devising new products and business strategies. And it's truly gratifying to see three such customer-oriented firms succeeding so well. But what about Facebook? Given all the recent concerns over Facebook's privacy protection policies, would you say it is as trustworthy as these other firms?

Continue reading "Is Facebook Trustworthy? (I think not.)" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (2)

When customers can go online and help themselves, we've always thought of this as the best kind of service there is: self-service. But social media tools have made it possible for businesses to provide an even better type of customer service: crowd-service. Companies such as SAP, Lenovo, Verizon, iRobot, and Pitney-Bowes are now using social media tools to enable some of their customers to help other customers. CustomerThink's Bob Thompson coined the term "crowd-service," a particularly descriptive and appealing label, analogous to "crowd sourcing." (You can download Thompson's white paper "Crowdservice," sponsored by RightNow, at our Web site 1to1.com.)

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Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (1)

There were three principle speakers the first morning of the World Business Forum - Bill George, Bill Conraty, and Patrick Lencioni, and they perfectly illustrate the generation-gap problem that afflicts discussions of management and technology these days.

The consensus around the Bloggers Hub was that Lencioni gave by far the best presentation, as a stand-up presenter. George had good material, although he didn't have the energy or style that Lencioni had. But Conraty was not so good, either in terms of style (a somewhat plain and boring PPT presentation) or substance (he seemed to miss the ball on CEO pay and on social media, for instance).

Continue reading "Generation Gap: The First Morning at World Business Forum" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's no secret that the pace of change is accelerating. The more innovations we create, the faster the next ones will come. And we're now even innovating the process of innovation itself, with companies doing "experiments" with small subsets of customers to test new ideas and bring things to market so much faster. Cycle times are accelerating, inventions get to market faster, and life continues to speed up.

Observing this from my own perspective as a man in his 50's, it occurs to me that as the pace of innovation has picked up, the distance between the generations has also increased. That is, our own children are much more different from their parents than we were from our parents. And I suspect, as the pace of change continues to increase, our children's children will be even more different from their parents.

Continue reading "Privacy Dies as Distance Between Generations Grows" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (9)