Republicans have for a long time focused on the “lower taxes” mantra. While recent events suggest that this mantra was probably not a sticky value, the idea of lowering taxes as a key objective is wrong and incredibly poor thinking–it’s not even good business thinking. These thoughts apply to all political parties. The real challenge is to lower my total costs, not just lowering one part of my cost burden while jacking up other costs that’s just cost-shifting which invariably is a zero-sum game. ...

Much has been said about Blockchain and how it will, literally, change the entire world. Blockchain is the hip and relatively new technology that has been described as the second coming of the internet. Most people are familiar with it based on the cryptocurrency, bitcoin, a pseduo-anonymous, distributed, public distributed ledger of currency. Depending on how you use the vocabulary, bitcoin/blockchain could refer to a variety of things ranging from the algorithm, the protocol or the currency. It’s been claimed that the blockchain can be applied to “all human endeavors”–as has been foretold since bitcoin came into the public view. It’s important to remember that blockchain technology is part of a cryptocurrency but a cryptocurrency is focused on payments while blockchain technology can be used for more than payments. ...

In the business world, drinking the kool-aid refers to an employee’s willingness to commit fully, without hesitation and without cynicism, to their organization’s and boss’s objectives–to be a fully engaged team member. I was thinking about a friend who recently changed jobs. He is a smart guy and always has two or things running in parallel–backup plans in case the primary activity fails. I had suggested that for the moment, he needs to drink the Kool-Aid on his primary activity. He needed to stop keeping options actively in play once he made his primary choice as maintaining options sometimes has its price. The idea was to stop thinking that the current gig was temporary. Was I wrong to recommend this? ...

CRM applications used by the frontline have been around for around 20-30 years. My first consulting job was designing a CRM portal for wealth management advisors distributed around the country. Technically, it was web based and was a bit of a reach at the time but it was highly innovate and essentially had all the moving parts you see in CRM applications today. Over time, I went on to design and launch many more CRM applications covering a broad range of areas some of which won awards or were highly placed. CRM apps cover a wide range of touchpoints usages and my focus here are those CRM apps used by the frontline when the engage with the customer. ...

There were two articles this week/month on social media advertising that did not seem to overlap per se but are related. The first is in HBR, March 2016 issue titled “Branding in the Age of Social Media.” (here) This article suggests that companies have spent billions on trying to build out their brands using social media but most of the money and effort has been a waste. The basic idea idea is that branded content and sponsorships in the past used to work because there were limited channels of distribution for the content and therefore most consumers had limited choices and had to watch what was shoved into those channels. ...