What We’re Reading: May 20 Edition
This May 20 post is our sixth installment of our weekly roundup of the must read articles on business, consulting, recruiting and jobs that we at Raines Intel are reading. Send articles you think we should feature to research@rainesinternational.com. Read last week’s installment.
1. Steve Cody, co-founder of Peppercomm, wrote at Inc. with suggestions for more productive travel, including to get quick, reliable wifi, find the airport lounge so you can work in quiet, stay calm and well-rested and sign up for loyalty programs. Read: “10 Tips to Make Your Next Business Trip More Productive and Profitable”
2. Jonathan Trevor and Barry Varcoe at Harvard Business Review discussed strategic alignment and highlighted a couple of questions to analyze and improve your business’s future.
“Strategic alignment, for us, means that all elements of a business — including the market strategy and the way the company itself is organized — are arranged in such a way as to best support the fulfillment of its long-term purpose,” Trevor and Varcoe explain. “While a company’s purpose generally doesn’t change, strategies and organizational structures do, which can make chasing ‘alignment’ between strategy and the organization feel like chasing an elusive will-o’-the-wisp.”
Read “A Simple Way to Test Your Company’s Strategic Alignment”
3. Forbes’ Hilary Brueck told us about “brunchwork,” a start-up meeting every other week in New York City “set up to help would-be entrepreneurs learn the first steps to selling their business ideas and getting hired.” Read “Could the Secret to Startup Success be…Brunch?”
4. Knowledge @ Wharton noted that “You can hardly separate now the person from his mobile phone, which changes dramatically the whole field of marketing.”
The site interviewed Jerry Wind about his book Beyond Advertising: Creating Value Through All Customer Touchpoints and found that:
“In a sense, the consumer now has access to all the information. There’s no longer this information asymmetry, where the manufacturer, the marketer, had information, and the consumer was at their mercy, not knowing what’s there.
“The consumer now has more information than the marketer. The consumer is in control. The consumer is skeptical. Consumers don’t trust advertising. They are the reason we have technology leading to the possibility of ad blockers.”
Read “Beyond Advertising: How Companies can build better customer relationships”