Archive: Leadership

Syndicated Commerce is catching on like wildfire as the new and improved way for Brands to build awareness, engage existing customers, acquire new customers, and drive loyalty in ways that are relevant, measurable and drive monetization.  As a long time ‘marketeer’, I believe the ultimate goal is to engage customers in more relevant and frequent ways to create an emotional ‘attachment’ to a Brand or a merchant.  The coveted ‘secret sauce’ to driving emotional attachments?  Trust. Road warriors, occasional business travelers, and leisure travelers all want...

Last week I had the privilege of sitting on a panel at the Wells Fargo Tech Transformation Summit conference in San Francisco with industry legends John Hagel, co-chairman, Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge, Toby Redshaw, the former CIO of American Express and Ray Wang, CEO and principal analyst at Constellation Research. The panel, moderated by Fortune’s Miguel Helft, pivoted off of the March 5 Wells Fargo Securities report by Jason Maynard, “Next on the Horizon – Syndicated Commerce,”  which is a new commerce category primed to turn the industry on its head. We...

We on the Deem@Work team are beginning to close the book on a fruitful 2012, which saw the introduction of Deem@Work in July, the debut of our first financial partner and the signing of even more customers (more on those soon!). As we look to accelerate that momentum in 2013, we will continue to focus on streamlining operations and driving traction of the Deem commerce platform. In that vein, we announced today the sale of ExpenseWire to Paychex, which will enable us to stay laser-focused on our Deem@Work product line. We originally purchased the ExpenseWire business to...

The birth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s led to a Cambrian explosion of innovation and a euphoric sense of transformational possibilities. From the beginning, there was a palpable sense that all aspects of our society would benefit from the democratization of information and the ability to collaborate in completely new ways. The reach of the Web’s transformational and disruptive attributes went beyond simply sharing information and establishing new forms of social connections. It was expected to fundamentally revolutionize commerce of all kinds –...

Many years ago at a management training class the instructor went over the 4 stages of knowledge progression. I found it a reasonable perspective. They are: We don’t know what we don’t know. We know we don’t know. We don’t know we know. We know we know. I, like everyone, am in all of these states, all the time, on different areas. I wrote a piece in my Adding Simplicity blog to encourage us all to embrace the fact that we are each in Stage 1 much more often than we are in the Holy Grail of Stage 4. Those who can put ego aside and make the journey toward knowledge...

In my last blog post I discussed some common traits of innovators and opportunities for innovation in travel. This week, as we head into the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit, I want to look at the other side of innovation – what’s holding it back. I’ll examine some of the common inhibitors of innovation and, conversely, how to truly commit to innovation. In is his iconic book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Christensen captures one of the most common inhibitors to innovation: the existing business.  A current business model is often threatened by...

One of this country’s greatest strengths has always been technological innovation, and that’s why we at Deem are so honored to be a finalist in a coveted travel industry award for innovation. The 2011 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit will honor global companies innovating to forever change travel planning, purchasing and memorializing. We will be competing on November 15th with 29 other companies for the DEMO Award for the Most Game-Changing Travel Innovation. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be contributing a series of posts exploring innovation. Today I want to...

In 1994, the emergence of Netscape allowed users to browse the Internet, find websites of interest through indexing (and subsequently search), and then transact through a safe online technology called the Secure Sockets Layer.  This early form of eCommerce enabled consumers to find content that was previously unobtainable, or that otherwise might have required a trip to another city, or a painful game of telephone tag. This weekend’s WSJ feature on Jeff Bezos is an entertaining read on the frenzy of the early days of a company that changed the face of ecommerce. For...