Commanding Business

Woo, Wow, and Win reveals the importance of designing your company around service, and offers clear, practical strategies based on the idea that the design of services is markedly different than manufacturing.

Most companies, both digital and brick-and-mortar, B2B or B2C; are not designed for service—to provide an experience that matches a customer’s expectations with every interaction and serves the company’s needs.

When customers...

Service design thinking is the designing and marketing of services that improve the customer experience, and the interactions between the service providers and the customers. We interview Marc Stickdorn, consultant, speaker and author of This Is Service Design Thinking. 

Key Takeaways:

[1:03] The big idea behind This Is Service Design Thinking.

[3:47] How the linear approach c...

In The Customer Funded Business, best-selling author John Mullins uncovers five novel approaches that scrappy and innovative 21st century entrepreneurs working in companies large and small have ingeniously adapted from their predecessors like Dell, Gates, and the Zieglers. John Mullins is an Associate Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School and a worldwide speaker and educator. He is a regularly...

Keith Casey is co-author of A Practical Approach to API design: From Principles to Practice. Former Developer Evangelist at Twilio, his current work with Okta focuses on identity and authentication APIs. Keith is a software engineer focusing on creating open architecture, specifically APIs. His goal is to get good technology into the hands of good people to do great things.

Key Takeaways:

Journalist, author, and speaker, Karen Dillon is a former editor of Harvard Business Review Magazine, and the former Deputy Editor of Inc. Magazine. She recently co-authored Competing Against Luck with Clay Christensen. 

Using the Jobs to Be Done framework, Karen Dillon and her co-authors help businesses understand what causes customers to "hire" a product or service. With that understanding, a business ...

David Hubbard is a Revenue Growth Expert and CEO of Marketing Outfield. He works with private and public companies to strategically align sales, marketing, and product development efforts and grow annual revenues by 25-50%. He creates growth machines by integrating a company’s core values into the customer decision-making process.

Key Takeaways:

[1:14] Many companies struggl...

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently the Head of Consulting and Education with MURAL, a leading online whiteboard for digital collaboration. Previously, Jim has worked with large companies, such as Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, Citrix, and eBay, among others. Jim Kalbach authored #1 Amazon Business Develop...

Author of the NYT and WSJ bestseller, Flash Foresight, Daniel Burrus is a leading futurist in global trends and innovation. A leading consultant to Google, Proctor & Gamble, IBM, and many other Fortune 500 firms, Daniel Burrus provides strategic advice for predicting forthcoming market innovators and anticipating disruptions before they disrupt. His Anticipatory Organization Model uses the key components of hard and s...

Author of six books, with a seventh in the works, Bill Halal is a Professor Emeritus of Management, Technology and Innovation at George Washington University. As the President of TechCast, Bill Halal and his team study the impact of artificial intelligence, the age of knowledge as compared to the age of consciousness, and future forecasting with a goal of simplifying change at the meso-economic level.

Best-selling author of three customer service books, John DiJulius shares how a company can make their customer service approach and their customer experience their single biggest competitive advantage. Training is the #1 factor in an employee’s ability to recognize and deliver world class customer service. In order to extract the gifts of a millennial workforce, an organization must include them in the corporate purp...

New York Times bestselling author and applied neuroscience expert Christine Comaford knows what it takes to move people from the Critter State into the Smart State, where they have full access to their own creativity, innovation, higher consAciousness, and emotional engagement. When an entire culture maintains that state, it becomes what she calls a SmartTribe. Focused. Accountable. Collaborative. Imbued with the ener...

Tim’s guest, David Evans, is one of the world’s leading authorities on multisided platform-based businesses. Many of the most dynamic public companies, from Alibaba to Facebook to Visa, and the most valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber, are matchmakers that connect one group of customers with another group of customers. Don’t let the flashy successes fool you, though. Starting a matchmaker is one of the toughes...

The smartest, most successful companies are using radically new membership models, subscription-based formats, and freemium pricing structures to grow their customer base―and explode their market valuation―in the most disruptive shift in business since the Industrial Revolution. Today's guest, Robbie Baxter, unpacks The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction and Build Recurring Reven...

Today’s guest, Jay Harman is the CEO of PAX Scientific and author of The Shark’s Paintbrush. In The Shark's Paintbrush, Harman introduces us to pioneering engineers in a wide array of businesses who are uncovering and copying nature’s hidden marvels. He shows business leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs how we can reconcile creating more powerful, lucrative technologies with maximizing sustainability. Jay Harman inject...

Sangeet Paul Choudary is co-chair of the MIT Platform Strategy Summit, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD business school, and author of Platform Revolution and Platform Scale. In this podcast episode, Sangeet Choudary defines the concepts and drivers behind the platform business model, including the three trends that gave rise to this type of business entity. He also explains why he created the metaphor of the sh...

Jack Daly is a worldwide expert on sales and growing sales. He has built six companies into national firms, is an Amazon bestselling author of Hyper Sales Growth, and has completed 15 Iron Man competitions in eight countries. Jack Daly's proven methodologies focus on people driving the business. On this episode, Jack speaks with Tim on how to build an invincible sales organization, the four legs to a strong culture an...

Marshall Van Alstyne is a Professor at Boston University and a Digital Fellow at MIT. He co-authored Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming The Economy And How To Make Them Work For You, and is a father of the theory of two-sided markets. Marshall joins Tim today to discuss how cutting-edge businesses are built on platforms: two-sided markets that are revolutionizing the way we do business. Tune i...

Today’s guest is the multi-faceted and uniquely talented Adam Richardson. He is the author of the book Innovation X: Why a Company’s Toughest Problems Are Its Greatest Advantage, and is a contributing writer for the Harvard Business Review. Adam was formerly a design lead at Frog Design focusing on strategy and user research practices and today, he works as a product manager at Financial Engines. He shares his insight...

Geoffrey Parker is a Professor of Engineering at the Thayer School at Dartmouth College, where he also serves as the Director of the Master of Engineering Management Program. In this podcast, he joins Tim to discuss his recent book, The Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming The Economy And How to Make Them Work for You. He also offers insights to business leaders who may be in the process of tran...