I grew up in New Orleans, a city justly renowned for its music history. Watching a band play in Preservation Hall is an education in many things, but it might also be a lesson in how to execute a strategic plan.

If Abe Lincoln had been a marketing manager today, well, the US would be a whole lot worse off. But if he were, he might say “You can please some of your customers all of the time, and all of your customers some of the time, but if you try to please all of your customers all of the time, you will please no one.” What is a company to make of that?

“Big Data” is big right now. It offers the promise of turning vast amounts of data into profits. Often, however, this promise is not fulfilled, because in order to reap the benefits of big data, you first have to know what the right data is. And that is a question that no AI can yet answer.

Joseph Heller’s dark satire Catch-22 proposes the term for problems that inherently prevent their own solutions. Creating good metrics can be seen as a Catch-22: Good metrics take time to create, but until you have good metrics there is no time to create them. How true is this and is there a way to break this cycle?

I lived in Western Europe for a year after college when I was a Watson Fellow. Adapting to new cultures and mores was difficult, but I was surprised at how much more difficult it was returning to my own country afterwards.

As we near the milestone in the US of 50% with at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, it is time to think about how to begin the transition back to the workplace. I think companies are going to find out that it is much more difficult than just “getting back to normal.” I can offer some things from quality and management to help out.

You’ve seen the situation – a manager makes the same mistakes over and over, an executive reads a book or article and decides to implement it at their organization. Why do they fail when they try to use their own or someone else’s experience? It’s because experience alone teaches nothing.