Thirty-six years ago, Peter Senge described one of management’s most admired organizational ideals: the learning organization. An enterprise that sees whole systems instead of isolated events. That senses cause and effect across months, not moments. That gets smarter with every customer interaction. Generations of executives read The Fifth Discipline, nodded, and went back to their dashboards. The tools existed in fragments. The integrated learning loop did not.

The integrated tooling exists now.

Picture it in practice. A company that hears a complaint while it’s still a whisper, before it becomes churn. That remembers why each customer arrived, not just what they clicked last week. That can trace this quarter’s revenue to last year’s decision and feed the lesson into the next one. A company where every interaction teaches the system, and the system makes every next interaction better. That’s not a metaphor for good management. It’s an architecture, and for the first time, you can build it.

The foundation is necessary. It is not sufficient.

Databricks just published its executive playbook for the agentic era, The New Architecture of Agentic AI, and it’s worth your time. More than twenty executives, one consistent message: outcome first, data layer before everything, governance as the engine rather than the brake. I’ve spent thirty years building digital experience platforms for global enterprises, and I agree with nearly all of it. The industry is converging on the foundation, and that’s genuinely good news. A meaningful enterprise consensus has formed.

But a foundation is a floor, not a finish line. The ebook’s own diagnosis points at what comes next: the models are smart enough; what they lack is context. Correct. So where does context come from? Not from a setting you configure or a layer you license. Context is meaning, accumulated over time. And meaning begins with a claim your dashboards were never built to handle.

Every number has a story to tell

Bounce rate tells you someone left, not what went wrong. Conversion tells you someone bought, not whether they’ll come back. Two decades of analytics have taught the enterprise to count everything and explain almost nothing. We’ve been taking temperatures and calling it diagnosis.

Senge saw why. Humans are poor at reading causality in complex systems. When cause and effect are separated by months, we judge decisions by the events nearby instead of the chain that produced them. A company trims brand investment to make a quarter. Sales soften two quarters later, so it trims again. Each cut is rational. Together they’re a flywheel spinning backward, and nobody in the room can see it, because the delay defeats intuition.

A number is the last sentence of a story that started somewhere else, some time ago. Today’s dip in Net Promoter Score may trace to a clumsy onboarding flow from last spring, or to advertising that promised more than the product delivered. The number is the symptom. The story is the structure. Read only the numbers and you’ll manage the symptoms forever.

Rows hold the nouns. Graphs hold the plot.

Stories don’t fit in rows and columns. A story is entities in relationship over time: this customer, that promise. This content, that moment. This decision, that outcome, six months apart. Relational data holds the nouns. The graph holds the plot.

So extend that consensus one layer up. The semantic layer in today’s playbooks is a dictionary: governed definitions of “active customer” and certified margin numbers. Necessary, and most enterprises still haven’t built it. But a dictionary defines words. It doesn’t tell stories. To follow the chain from an ad impression through an onboarding stumble to a renewal decision, the enterprise needs a persistent relational model of meaning over time. For complex, longitudinal customer journeys, a knowledge graph is the natural architecture: customers, content, products, policies, and moments, connected by relationships a machine can traverse.

Semantic enrichment is the discipline that builds and maintains it. It binds meaning to data across the customer, the content, and the context of the interaction. It works across structured and unstructured sources, and it defines relationships dynamically instead of rebuilding the database every time the business changes. Once the graph is in place, an agent stops retrieving isolated records and starts traversing relationships across time. A graph does not prove causality, but it preserves the structure needed to form and test causal hypotheses. That is the difference between producing an answer and constructing an explanation.

A garden, not a monument

A knowledge graph is a garden, not a monument. Monuments get finished, dedicated, and photographed. Gardens get tended, because everything in them is alive. Products change. Policies get revised. Language drifts. Customers evolve. The graph is a living model of the enterprise, and living models need curators.

The emerging architecture consensus is right that governance is the engine, not the brake. Curation is governance applied to meaning. Someone has to own the ontology the way finance owns the ledger: adding what’s new, retiring what’s dead, reconciling what conflicts. Stop tending the garden and context decays silently. The agents keep answering, confident and polite, from a model of a company that no longer exists. Semantic initiatives rarely fail loudly. They fail by standing still, declared one and done, while the enterprise moves on without them.

Context is what customers feel

All of this cashes out at the one place strategy becomes experience: the customer.

Basic personalization says, “I know your name.” Contextualization says, “I understand what you need next.” The first is a lookup. The second requires persistent relational memory: who this person is, what they’ve been through with you, and what moment they’re in right now. And the experience has to fit the context, not just the message. Channel, tone, interface, timing. A correct answer in the wrong register, at the wrong moment, on the wrong surface, is still a failed experience.

Agents raise the stakes because agents remove the pause. A dashboard built on a wrong assumption sits there until an analyst questions it. An agent with governed data and no customer context doesn’t fail loudly. It fails politely, at machine speed, with perfect lineage: factually correct, well-governed, and contextually irrelevant.

Built to listen

Put the pieces together and Senge’s aspiration becomes an operating loop. The foundation holds the facts. The graph holds the story. Curation keeps the story true. Agents act on it in the moment. Instrumentation records what happened. Evaluation tests whether the intervention worked. The result feeds back into the graph, sharpening the next interaction. Without that loop, the system accumulates history but does not necessarily learn. With it, the enterprise stops reacting to symptoms and starts seeing structures. It catches the reinforcing loop while it’s still forming. It remembers each customer relationship across years, not sessions. It learns.

And learning compounds where technology doesn’t. Model advantages decay quickly. Platforms converge. Accumulated understanding of your customers is the one asset a competitor can’t license, because nobody can copy what your customers taught you.

One of the sharpest lines in the Databricks ebook comes from Stephen Ecker, chief data officer at Trinity Industries: “The data layer is the strategy.” At the infrastructure layer, he is right. At the experience layer, the story is the strategy. The foundation determines what the enterprise can know. The learning loop determines whether it gets smarter.

Every number has a story to tell. The companies that pull ahead will be the ones built to listen.

Disclosure: my company builds knowledge-graph infrastructure for enterprise AI, so I have a commercial interest in this argument. I'd make it anyway.

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Share The Desk of Brad

There are lots of books about holding people accountable, often times these books focus on the clarity of the responsibilities, measurement or structuring conversations that cut through the excuses. Yes, these are all important things to focus on. What I don’t like about many of these books is that accountability is more often a byproduct of great teamwork.

No one who is committed wants to let their teammates down.

So, let’s assume that you work with Smart and Happy people who are committed… but for some reason they are struggling in their job. What should you do to help them? Here are a few things I’ve learned in my career that have helped me bridge the gaps in my teams:

I always try to put myself in the other person’s shoes. What is going on for
them, what is their workload, what is the work that needs to get done and how does it fit with their skill set?

Is the issue a repeating problem or a pattern or is it a one off?
If it’s a repeating pattern then is the issue systemic, a problem with the
way the company is organized, or is it a deficiency in that person’s
abilities? If it’s a one off, is there something going on in the person’s life that we all need to take into consideration? Are they sick, going through a
personally hard time, etc.?

Are they open to having a discussion with me about the concern or do I need to involve someone else (maybe someone in leadership) to address the concern.

I seek first to understand before I make any judgements. It’s easy to blame people and it’s easy to assign reasons for why they are not meeting expectations, but that is laziness and shows a lack of respect.

My mom always used to say that if you respect someone, you’re actively examining your beliefs about that person and re-looking at your underlying assumptions. Once I’ve taken the time to understand, then I take a hard look in the mirror and ask myself am I contributing to or causing the problem?

Then teamwork should kick in… What can I do to help? Does this person need encouragement? Do they need additional resources? Do they have a personal issue that needs attention? Or in a few cases does this person need a corrective talk? If it’s something that is just really difficult for someone (we all have stuff we suck at (responding to email for me) then how can we change the system to help that person be more successful?

Anytime someone on your team is not performing or meeting expectations… it’s almost never an individual problem; it’s a way of working, a way of resourcing or a way of supporting someone’s problem. Don’t be quick to anger, quick to blame or worse yet- stand around and watch someone fail. We win together and we lose together. Be the kind of co-worker that makes everyone around you better. It’s why we have Kudos in the desk of Brad, our better selves should be expressed in the quality of our teamwork.

Let’s go be great!

Brad

Hi Everyone,

Where everyone knows your name… and they’re always glad you came.

Do you make your customers feel this way? Do you know them and are you glad to be working for them? Our business is based on relationships and adding value.

I was thinking recently about a bar I go to where two of the staff, Jason and John, make the place a great experience for me. Not because the drinks are special. Because they remember me. They ask about my week. They make me feel like coming in was a good decision.

That got me thinking about how each of you makes great experiences for our clients. Over the next week, send me what you do to make working with you a great experience. I’ll feature the ideas in next week’s Desk of Brad.

If you find yourself short on answers, then it’s time for a personal inventory. Why are you here? Our goal is to make millions of people a little happier every day. Your clients should be part of that equation. If you’re not proactively trying to figure out how to make a difference and leveraging your unique value to make it happen, then it’s time to get started.

We have a lot to be thankful for. A great team. Great clients. A chance to make a difference in our work. We are agents of change, and change is hard. The comfort of a strong relationship and excellent work is what allows our clients to change in the first place. We are happiest when we do hard work and begin to see the results. Think about getting in shape, going on a diet, or learning a new language. The work is hard. The results are worth it.

Like a good trainer, friend, or teacher, let’s help our clients achieve the outcomes they want.

Our clients deserve to feel like they just walked into Cheers when they interact with you. So do your colleagues. We hire smart and happy people. Let your bubble of joy surround your clients and your team.

It’s not too late to get started. It’s not too late to make a change. It’s not too late to put others above yourself. And if none of that works, then fake it until you make it. Put that smile on and let it shine.

Let’s go be great,

Brad

Hi All,

There are challenges in our business. There always have been and always will be. The strength of a team is the ability to overcome those challenges.

There are many new projects and initiatives in front of us right now. I’d say in many ways we have more opportunities than ever. The work being done is some of the best ever produced by this company. You should be proud of it.

As we drive to consummate these new projects and roll out a new account and delivery model, we are going to have some bumps along the way. We work for big clients with complex organizations, and getting to yes while more effectively organizing ourselves is hard work. We’ve changed a lot of things recently, and I see the momentum.

In order to realize the opportunity in front of us, I need each of you to push hard and not leave any options or conversations unaddressed. It doesn’t matter if the challenge is inside the company and how we are executing, or inside the client. You have to speak up and help create the right outcome. Silence is often perceived as acceptance. We need to hear your voice.

There is a favorite book of mine, The Bumps Are What You Climb On. The moral is that if life were smooth, there’d be nothing to hold on to as you climbed the mountain. Let’s pull each other up and get to the top.

Time to pull together and be heroes.

Let’s go be great,

Brad

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been talking with my daughter about a charity she wants to start. She is going to call it Boxes of Hope, essentially boxes full of items that would benefit children in need. Toys, treats, and books. She is eleven years old, and I was a bit surprised and delighted by her ambition. You know I am a proud father, like everyone. She asked me for help getting an organization started and for some lessons learned.

So I said to her, you have to start with the why before you worry about the what.

I explained that the first act of our company, before we had a name and a clear business plan, was to write down our values. It was important to me to define what the values of the company would be as the basis for why we existed, rather than the other way around. As a reminder, our values are:

1. If you care about your employees and you care about your clients, you’ll have a company worth caring about.

2. We hire for character before we hire for capability.

3. We believe in the marketplace of ideas.

4. We hire interesting people who are interested in change.

5. We look for smart and happy people.

They are the guideposts. The ambition of the company. The decision to focus on customer experience management, and subsequently to recognize that we could make millions of people a little happier every day, was the natural evolution of the business.

Start with the why before you worry about the what applies to much more than the formation of a company or a charity. Think about the work you do for our clients. Ask yourself why. Why are we doing this work?

We have a bunch of new projects kicking off. Has each team sat down and come to a conclusion about the why for each one? I am quite certain that project plans, schedules, and resourcing are all in full swing. Those are the what and the how. Not the why.

Take some time as a team and discuss the why. Write it down. Make sure everyone on your team understands it. It is the north star for all of our client engagements.

Let’s go be great,

Brad

Hi Everyone,

In thinking about what to write this week, I went back to a three-part series I wrote in 2012 called Our Inspiration, Our Values, Our Mission. It’s always good to revisit such things from time to time. You can learn a lot about the true purpose of a company by examining how closely it still adheres to its core principles years down the road. It’s a check on one’s commitment to what one believes, or believed, as the case may be. Ideally, the ideas that bound the company together then still apply today. In Tahzoo’s case, what I wrote then is perhaps even stronger now, if that’s possible. A good sign.

This week we return to part one.

Our Inspiration

Tahzoo is not just a job for me. It’s a labor of love. I have been fortunate to work for some great companies, and I’ve seen the impact a great company can have on the world. My inspiration comes from seeing what a group of committed and determined people can accomplish. That’s why we started Tahzoo.

We are in a time of unparalleled change and opportunity. Technology is recreating the way companies and their customers engage. We haven’t seen a time like this since the advent of TV, well before any of us were born. During such periods of change, only a handful of companies rise to lead the way. Tahzoo is one of those companies.

I think we all want to work for a company that is both inspirational to others and that inspires change in the way business is done.

A business can be inspirational in many ways. It might be in how we work together to tackle difficult problems. We are a group of smart, happy people who proactively provide cutting-edge solutions. In return, we get to do meaningful, rewarding work.

Tahzoo is inspirational in the sense that we inspire our clients to take actions they might not otherwise have taken so they can change the world. Often, that means our clients are betting their careers on our ability to deliver. That takes a lot of inspiration on our part too.

In times of change, people need leadership. We are a company that provides such leadership. This is about caring enough about your clients to take the time to proactively solve their problems.

Inspiration is a way of systematically exceeding our clients’ expectations, each other’s expectations, and even our own. For each of us, this is a time to ask: what could we be doing for one another and our clients that makes a real difference in their business and in the world?

I recognize that this may seem lofty, perhaps beyond what you’d expect from most jobs. You’re right. If you work for Tahzoo, you seek to be part of something bigger than yourself. Part of a community. Working every day with a group of people who expect more of themselves and more of each other.

I hope you came to Tahzoo for precisely those opportunities. To work for a great company. To inspire your colleagues and your clients with your thoughtfulness, innovation, and determination.

Let’s go be great,

Hi Everyone,

Have you ever noticed that a smile from someone can just make your day?

In our business, our clients are looking to us for the ideas and the energy to change. To persevere through difficult transitions. To be open-minded about new approaches and new opportunities. No matter how compelling your argument, no matter how sound your reasons, absolutely nothing starts a conversation off better than a smile.

So even when you’re busy, even when you’re concentrating, and especially when you’re with a client, remember to smile.

Have a smile on your face. A smile in your voice. Use your smile to brighten someone’s day.

Let’s go be great,

Brad

Hi Everyone,

Success is a byproduct of consistency.

Consistency is the secret ingredient that turns good businesses into great ones. It means repeatedly delivering on our promises and maintaining a high standard of quality in every aspect of our work.

Consistency breeds trust. Our clients know what to expect, and we deliver as expected. It is why they choose Tahzoo. Trust is the currency of business relationships. It is hard to earn and easily lost. If we want new projects, or to be referred to new clients, we need to do a great job for the customers we already have. If you take care of your customers, they will take care of you. The formula is straightforward and easy to understand. It still takes hard work and discipline to execute.

I am going to be closely auditing our client experience for the foreseeable future. Checking to see if our deliverables went out the night before. Asking for meeting minutes to be shared after the meeting. When I was a manager at Nordstrom, I used to say: you get what you inspect, not what you expect.

We need to raise the bar and operate as a highly professional boutique consulting firm. I am counting on each of you to do your part.

Let’s go be great,

Brad

Hi Everyone,

Great teams have a common understanding of the central tenets that give the company meaning and purpose. In Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why, he makes a compelling argument that people are more interested in why you do what you do than in what it is you do. It’s a great read.

I have been thinking about the year ahead and there are a few questions that I want everyone to know the answers to. Don’t be surprised if you get called on by me or anyone in leadership to answer these, and please make sure that folks who are new to the company know them too.

Why did I start Tahzoo? To create a company where people could continuously learn and grow to become the best versions of themselves.

What is our mission? To make millions of people a little bit happier every day.

What are our core values?

1. If you care about your clients and you care about your employees, you’ll have a company worth caring about.

2. We look for interesting people who are interested in change.

3. We believe in the marketplace of ideas.

4. We hire for character before we hire for capability.

5. We believe in smart and happy people.

What is the most important tool for improving employee satisfaction? The Voice of the Culture Survey and Kudos.

What are our top three priorities?

1. Great customer service

2. Perfect quality work

3. Driving profitability

How do you know if a client is happy? They tell you, and they buy more services.

How did we come up with the name Tahzoo? We had five criteria for the perfect name:

1. It had to be a six-letter domain name

2. It needed to be two syllables

3. The name should not mean anything

4. It should sound vaguely familiar and slightly whimsical

5. There needed to be search engine equity in the first three letters

With GoDaddy open and having tried countless names, I noticed that behind the barista there were Tazo Tea boxes while sitting at a Starbucks. That provided the inspiration, and Tahzoo became the name of our company.

These are our founding stories. Make sure everyone in the company knows the answers.

Let’s go be great!

Hi Everyone,

I spent twelve years at Nordstrom and held a lot of jobs. I started on the sales floor. I wrapped gifts during the holidays. I worked the switchboard, the old plug board kind, routing every call coming in and going out of the store.

The switchboard had nothing to do with selling clothes. I wasn’t ringing a register. I wasn’t styling anyone or building a display. I was answering a phone.

But I was the first voice most customers heard. Before they walked through the door. Before they met a salesperson. Me. The way I picked up that phone decided whether they felt welcome or in the way. Whether they bothered to come in. Whether they told a friend about us, or warned them off.

That is selling. It just doesn’t look like selling.

The receptionist sells. The developer sells. The person who answers the support ticket sells. The person who writes the invoice sells. Every interaction either earns the next one or burns it.

If your people don’t know that, that is not their failure. That is yours. It means you haven’t drawn the line for them between what they do on a Tuesday morning and the customer who decides, six months later, whether you are worth coming back to.

Draw the line. Make it visible. Make it specific to their job. Then watch what happens when people who thought they were behind the scenes realize they have been on the front line the whole time.

Let’s go be great.

Brad

“I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

– Mark Twain

Flow State

About three or four months ago I changed the locked screen on my phone to a quote from Mark Twain. “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” Read that quote again… it took me a second read to get it.

I put this on my lock screen because I spend every day running through scenarios in my head about how to drive the business, manage conversations, make decisions, etc. It’s a very useful habit for the job I have but it was also adding to my stress level. When I read this quote it gave me the freedom to be more dispassionate and analytical about things. It was a way to remind myself not to allow my brain to run wild, generating anxiety around worst-case scenario outcomes.

I originally wrote this during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the techniques are universal. It got me thinking about anxiety and how I manage that in my life. First of all, let’s just be super clear, we are living in a time of heightened anxiety and stress. Each of our lives have been disrupted and the timeline for the end of all of this is at best, ambiguous. So, it’s normal and okay to be anxious these days and you won’t always recognize it when it’s happening to you. You could find yourself short-tempered, not sleeping well or just having trouble motivating yourself… anxiety manifests in many different ways.

Personal Inventory

I want each of you to take a quick anxiety self-inventory – a little homework for each of you, so grab a pen and paper or open notepad and answer the following questions:

1. How do you feel when you recognize you’re anxious? Describe the physical feeling… do you feel tension in your shoulders or sick to your stomach? Whatever it feels like for you, write it down.

2. What was going on in your brain right before you became anxious? What were you doing or thinking about? For example, as I mentioned today, my Mom went into the hospital last night and I found myself working and the random thought of “what am I going to do if, God forbid she dies,” popped into my head.

3. What triggers an anxious thought or loss of focus for you? For me it’s two things, random thoughts and when I consciously play out worst-case scenarios. As with all of these questions, everyone is different, so do your best to write down your experience. There is no right or wrong here.

4. When you’re triggered how does your communication or thought process change? Do you talk differently, does your choice of language change? For example, when I am anxious, I talk a lot faster than normal.

5. Write out a list of 5 things you do that cause you to lose track of time. For me they’re reading, writing, tennis, chess, playing with my kids, going on long drives, watching movies and a few other things. Write out your list.

I want you to do this exercise so that you can be more aware of when you’re anxious, and what is going on for you when that happens. I don’t have a magic pill for you but as you can imagine I have a stressful job, so I’ll share some of my techniques to manage stress.

My Remedies

I watch comedies – laughter is great medicine. My brother Matt has a few impressions of President Camacho from Idiocracy that have left me rolling on the floor a couple of times.

I’ve turned off all of the notifications on my phone, except the ringer. I make a conscious choice to use my phone, but I don’t let all of those notifications trigger my anxiety or remove me from the moment.

I walk around a lot, I don’t mean I take a lot of long walks, but I mean I get up and move around.

Several times a day I stop what I’m doing to focus on breathing and relaxing. I also try to enjoy a view. I look out a window or at a piece of art or at something that’s aesthetically pleasing to me.

I exercise. You just can’t beat the restorative power of exercise. Get up and do something, go for a fast walk.

I write out a to-do list every day. Doing this gives me a feeling of control and I make conscious choices around how I am going to spend my day.

Lastly, try to do something every day that makes me lose track of time. Go look at your list and do more of it! It will help inoculate you from moments of stress. They call it being in flow, go look up Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s work on Flow. There are many benefits to being “in flow.”

These are a few of my coping techniques. Each of us has our own patterns, take the time to be conscious and present about feeling anxious so that you can manage it. I realize that for some people anxiety is a medical condition and my techniques may not get the job done, that’s between you and your doctor.

We are all agents of change. We can spread positive energy and reduce anxiety in ourselves and for each other. We can make the world a little bit better every day. We are all capable of that.

Let’s go be great.

— George Washington

Every business has a way of doing things. Most of the time, that way is accidental, the accumulated habits of people who were never given a better option. IQO is the deliberate alternative: a system for building a company that knows what it does, knows whether it’s working, and can repeat it at scale.

It has three parts. Together, they form a covenant, a promise to clients, to employees, and to the business itself, that what we deliver will be intentional, measurable, and consistent.

Innovation: The Search for the Best Way

Innovation is often confused with creativity. Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt drew the distinction: “Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.” Innovation isn’t ideation. It’s action.

Innovation is the heart of every exceptional business.

And the most important place to aim it is not at your product, but at the way your business operates. How you interact with clients matters more than what you deliver. By recognizing that it is not just the work itself that demands innovation, but also how that work is presented, scoped, and fulfilled, we aim our innovative energies at the way business does business.

For innovation to be meaningful, it has to take the client’s point of view. Every engagement begins with a promise, a covenant between you and the client about what’s possible and how you’ll get there together. Innovation is the discipline of constantly asking whether you’re keeping that promise in the best possible way, or whether friction, complexity, and habit have gotten in the way. If a process doesn’t make things easier for the client, it’s not innovation. It’s complication.

Innovation is the mechanism through which a business identifies itself in the mind of its customers and establishes its individuality. It is the result of a scientifically generated and quantifiably verified profile of your clients’ perceived needs and unconscious expectations.

The discipline is asking, every day, “What is the best way to do this?” Knowing you’ll probably never find the definitive answer, but that by asking, you’ll always find a better one than you have now.

Innovation is the “Best Way” skill. It produces energy in every company where it’s nurtured, fed, and stimulated. That energy feeds everyone the company touches: employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. In an innovative company, everyone grows.

Innovation is the signature of a bold, imaginative brand.

Quantification: The Truth Is in the Numbers

Lord Kelvin put it plainly in 1883: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. When you cannot, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”

What was true for physics is true for business. If you can’t measure it, you can’t predict it. If you can’t predict it, you can’t improve it. Quantification is how we hold ourselves and our business accountable.

Quantification is how a business learns to see itself clearly.

Most companies default to qualitative analysis. They trust their instincts. They tell stories about what’s working. But stories aren’t data, and instinct doesn’t scale. Few companies thoroughly quantify their operations, even the ones that believe in measurement.

Making the commitment to quantify everything about how you do business will profoundly change both your results and your culture. It means tracking the things that matter:

• What was the measurable business impact of our work?

• How many positive client interactions do we have each day?

• Are our capabilities aligned with our pipeline?

Eventually, you think of your entire business in terms of numbers. You can read the company’s health the way a doctor reads vitals. Not guessing but knowing. Because without numbers you can’t possibly know where you are, let alone where you’re going. And when you do know, you can act with confidence instead of hope.

Quantification turns intuition into intelligence.

Orchestration: Consistency in Execution

W. Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality management, said it simply: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

You’ve innovated a process. You’ve quantified its impact. Now orchestration ensures your clients get a consistent result, every time. Orchestration is the elimination of discretion at the operating level: replacing individual judgment with a reliable system so that the promise you made to the client is the promise they actually experience.

Orchestration is the discipline that turns a good idea into a reliable business.

Without it, nothing can be planned and nothing anticipated, by you or your client. If everyone in the company is doing things by their own preference rather than following a shared system, they aren’t creating order. They’re creating chaos. Discretion, however well-intentioned, is the enemy of progress, standardization, and quality.

A process that hasn’t been orchestrated can’t be consistent. A process that isn’t consistent can’t be depended on. And a process that can’t be depended on isn’t a business model. It’s a collection of talented people making it up as they go.

A business model is simply your unique way of doing business. IQO is the system that makes that way repeatable. It provides the vehicle for predictability, for ensuring that the covenant you made at the start of every engagement is honored at every step. Because unless clients experience what they were promised, every single time, they will go someplace else to get it.

Orchestration is the glue that holds a company to its customers’ perceptions. It is the certainty that is absent from every other human experience, the order and logic behind the human craving for reason. It is as simple as doing what you say you’re going to do, saying what you mean, and meaning what you say.

Orchestration is what makes a promise keepable.

The Cycle Never Stops

Once you’ve innovated, quantified, and orchestrated something, you’re not done. The world will collide with whatever you’ve built and sooner or later destroy it. IQO is not a one-time project. It’s a permanent operating discipline. You innovate, measure, systematize, and then you do it again.

When you think of Orchestration absent Innovation and Quantification, you’re describing an action stripped of its purpose, its meaning, its vitality. The three only work together.

Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration are the backbone of every extraordinary business. I want ours to be extraordinary.

The People Who Keep the Covenant

IQO is a system. But systems don’t build themselves, and they don’t run on autopilot. They run on people who understand the covenant, the promise made to every client at the start of every engagement, and who take personal ownership of keeping it.

That’s what transforms work from a habit into a craft. When you commit to IQO, you stop thinking about tasks and start thinking about the promise behind them. Am I innovating the best way to deliver on this commitment? Am I measuring whether it’s working? Am I making it repeatable so the next client gets the same result?

The people who ask those questions, who hold themselves to that standard, are the ones who build extraordinary businesses.

Our mission is to make millions of people a little happier every day. That’s not a slogan. It’s what happens when smart people commit to keeping the covenant, every day, in every interaction.

Let’s go be great.

“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.”

— Mandy Hale

When I started my company in 2010, my central thesis was that personalized experiences would replace the “one size fits all” digital experience. From a marketing perspective, it wasn’t that companies couldn’t figure out who you were or the experience that would be most pleasing to you. The gating factor was that they couldn’t get the right unit of content in front of you quickly enough to make a difference. Turns out that the trend I spotted was and is still true today. While platforms have evolved to tackle some of these issues, there are still technology, strategy, and process gaps that we need to overcome.

I’ve been clearing my calendar to think about the next decade of work. I thought I’d share the questions I’ve been exploring.

The Mathematics of Experience

Mathematics continues to evolve at an accelerating pace. Our ability to write equations that describe our world and our experience is developing rapidly. How should we be applying advancements in mathematics to business?

If I wanted to write an equation that would describe the relative likelihood that I’d visit a Starbucks at 4:30 tomorrow afternoon, what would that look like? What mathematical domains would be necessary to build a reliable model?

What is the relationship between brand affinity and proximity? You might walk two blocks at lunch for your favorite sandwich, but six blocks would be too far. Is there a level of discounting or incentivization that would impact your behavior to walk those additional four blocks? Ronny Chieng does a routine on Amazon Prime becoming “Prime Now.” Two-hour delivery is no longer sufficient; it needs to be Prime NOW. It’s funny, but there is truth in our growing expectation that companies anticipate our needs. How do we help our clients write equations that anticipate what someone will want now?

Machine Learning and the Customer Experience

Given the advancements in mathematics, how are we going to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve the customer experience? The wonderful thing about digital experiences is that they’ve given us sample sizes that are statistically valid. There are millions and millions of digital interactions to measure. When we move from statistically based personalization models to algorithmically based ones, how will that impact personalization? What level of uplift will we get from a marketing and customer service perspective?

What new technologies do we need to master to lead the market in these categories? How will our engineering rigor need to change when the building of the enterprise marketing platform is only the first step in the experiment?

A Grand Unified Theory of Content

We are still in need of a grand unified theory of content. We have good tools for searchability (thank you, Google) and findability, which is a byproduct of standardizing UX, but that’s not sufficient. In spite of all the improvements, consumers are still left with the task of finding and navigating content. We still aren’t able to describe content in terms that allow computers and AI to understand it well enough to build effective algorithms for personalization.

I’ve experimented with using the discipline of semiotics to codify content. Certainly DITA, XML, S1000D, and mapping ontologies are all helpful, but we need to bring all of this together into a unified framework for describing content. I don’t have this all figured out, but I sense there is a path that will combine all of these standards into a game-changing solution.

Complexity Theory and Business

This leads to the next set of questions, which involve complexity theory. A complex system is composed of many diverse parts that are highly interconnected and capable of adaptation. If you think about how a brand interacts with its customers on a global scale, you have a complex system. When you think about a company with many different disciplines all working toward a common goal, you have a complex system.

How do we help clients understand the complexity of their customer engagement? How would we visualize that? How would we understand the interactions well enough to make recommendations that positively impact business outcomes?

I recently connected with Kirell Benzi, who creates art by visualizing complex systems and data sets. For those interested in complexity theory, the Santa Fe Institute is a remarkable resource. One of the most important questions for the next decade: how do we build teams comprised of diverse skill sets that effectively collaborate to serve clients?

AI Will Change Everything

AI will be a couple of orders of magnitude more impactful than the advent of the Internet. Imagine how much the world has changed because of the Internet, then multiply the amount of change in the last 25 years by 100. That is what AI is going to bring to our world. We won’t experience a linear progression of change. There will be quantum leaps in technology and understanding. The advancements in science, knowledge, and technology will be astounding beyond belief.

This will create cultural and economic disruption on a scale not seen before in human history. To put this in perspective, it took the Catholic Church about 200 years to come to terms with Galileo’s notion that the earth revolves around the sun. We won’t have that luxury of time.

The Crisis of Belief

Beliefs are our brain’s way of making sense of and navigating our complex world. They are mental representations of the ways our brain expects things in our environment to behave, and how things should be related to each other. Beliefs are templates for efficient learning and are often essential for survival.

What happens when long-standing belief systems are eliminated or proven wrong, virtually overnight? We won’t have 200 years to come to terms with the change in knowledge or perspective. How would we need to teach differently if accepted truths and norms are regularly in jeopardy? What long-standing principles are likely to be challenged in the next decade?

If capitalism is based on a risk-reward relationship, what happens when the risk is virtually eliminated by computing power? That’s not to say that randomness goes away, just that the calculation of risk will be almost perfect. How do you invest your money in a world where the rate of return is already a certainty? What does that mean for capitalism, and will we need to invent a new economic model? All the people who owned big castles in Europe during the Middle Ages thought they would be the dominant economic model for the foreseeable future. Now they are places to visit on vacations.

Or look at healthcare. What happens when life expectancy skyrockets because we apply virtually unlimited computing power to monitoring your health? What would it mean for our economy if average life expectancy doubles in the next 20 years? What does that mean for managing resources and population? If you think that’s not a possibility, start reading and talking to scientists who are at the forefront of this revolution.

The Governance Question

All of us can see how social media is affecting our democracy. Do the basic concepts of freedom of speech apply to machines and computers too? It won’t be long before computers generate more content than human beings. What laws and rules do we need to govern that scenario? How should we think about government, the rule of law, and self?

There is a great quote by Carl Sagan, written in 1995:

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time, when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Eerily familiar given the world today. That can’t be the end state, so what happens next?

What Comes Next

We are seeing the beginning of cultural change at an unprecedented scale. I say all the time that we exist to make millions of people a little bit happier every day. We’ve got the ambition and a company of smart and happy people that are and will continue to make a difference.

I am working on these questions and I invite your input and perspective. The work we do is important, and we need to make sure that our thesis for the next decade is a guiding light.

I am certainly not done thinking about what comes next. I am focused on considering and contemplating what the future holds so we can anchor ourselves to the prospect of creating a better world. While at times I am daunted by what comes next, I am also an optimist and I have an unshakeable vision for a greater and more fulfilling world. It’s up to each of us to make a difference.

Let’s go be great.

— Isaac Newton

In a real-world setting, a good salesperson sizes up a new prospect walking in the door and within seconds begins to tailor the conversation to that person’s needs. They read body language, ask the right questions, and adapt. It is instinctive, human, and remarkably effective.

In the digital world, the union of data and content management technologies now allows companies to replicate that same instinct at scale, delivering different content to each customer based on what we know about them in real time. We call this personalization, and it represents a fundamental shift from one-way broadcasting to genuine two-way conversation between brands and their customers.

The impact will be particularly significant in the relationship-based business-to-business space. The technologies for delivering nuanced, personalized content are well established and proven to drive business results through contextual relevancy, higher conversion rates, and long-term customer loyalty. The infrastructure exists. The data exists. The question is why so few companies are doing it well.

The Fired Salesperson

Here is a simple test: if a sales representative sold the way most B2B websites do, they would be fired. Not coached, not retrained. Fired.

For far too long, marketers have gotten away with being terrible salespeople online because they are insulated by the law of large numbers. If they churn through enough people, eventually some small portion will convert to customers. Volume is the name of the game. But volume is also tremendously expensive and inefficient. Worse, it ignores a fundamental truth about customer experience: loyalty is not built in a single transaction. It is the cumulative result of every interaction a customer has with a company, positive and negative alike. Every generic page, every irrelevant recommendation, every moment a website fails to recognize what a customer actually needs is a small withdrawal from that account. Churn enough people through a bad experience and you have not just lost a sale. You have trained your market to expect nothing from you.

The growing gap between truly responsive experiences, those that adapt content to the user based on what we know about the user, and the standard one-size-fits-all content model reveals a fundamental weakness in how most firms sell their products in the digital realm. The technology is not the problem. The thinking is the problem.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Our ability to know the customer through data is better and more powerful than ever. The technology is sophisticated enough to make true personalization a reality. But there is more to the arithmetic of marketing than data and technology alone.

Much of the fault for the state of online selling falls at the feet of a simple failure: companies do not understand how their customers become educated about products and services. They treat the buying journey as a funnel to be optimized rather than as a learning process to be designed.

This is where marketers keep making the same mistake. They reinvent the wheel. They build frameworks from scratch, ignoring decades of proven research on how humans actually learn, evaluate, and make decisions. There are entire fields of study, education theory, cognitive science, behavioral economics, that have spent generations answering precisely the questions marketers are struggling with today. The work has been done. The experts have spoken. The principles are proven. The question is whether we are humble enough to use them.

For inspiration, I turned to a principle of education theory known as Learning Models, first developed by the academic Robert Gagné in the 1980s. Gagné identified nine instructional events that move a learner from attention to retention to transfer. Every good teacher knows this sequence. Every good salesperson practices it instinctively. Almost no B2B website reflects it at all.

When you marry Gagné’s Learning Models with digital personalization, you get a comprehensive framework for the customer experience that addresses the full arc: how customers think about their own business problems and potential solutions, the step-by-step process for educating a prospect through digital channels, how to gather accurate data about those customers, and the technology to deliver a relevant experience that actually sells.

Why This Matters Now

This is not just an argument about personalization. It is a first-principles argument about how we should approach the entire customer experience.

If a considered purchase requires some level of education so that the consumer has the information necessary to make a purchasing decision, then we should rely on the experts who have spent their careers studying how people learn. We should not reinvent the wheel. We should stand on the shoulders of the people who have already solved these problems in other domains and apply their insights with the precision that modern technology makes possible.

This principle, leverage proven academic and expert frameworks rather than building from scratch, will only become more important as the tools at our disposal grow more powerful. Artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs, semantic content models, and scoring frameworks all depend on the same foundational insight: technology is only as good as the thinking behind it. Get the thinking right, and the technology becomes transformative. Get it wrong, and you have built an expensive machine that is still a terrible salesperson.

To remain relevant to today’s digitally driven B2B customers, the industry must move toward greater personalization. If today’s leaders do not take up the charge, a competitor will find a better way to meet the needs of those customers. The B2B space is ripe for disruption, and the disruptor will not be the company with the most data or the best technology. It will be the company that understood how customers actually learn and built the experience around that understanding.

To effectively communicate relevant and personalized content means opening the floodgate, but first inviting consumers to explore their options through a process of genuine self-education. Mere presentation of information must progress to a real and lasting conversation between customers and companies. When learning models and digital personalization are truly aligned, then customers are both engaged and educated. That is when great things happen.

Let’s go be great.

— Steve Jobs

When Customers Give Up

Someone close to me spent a Saturday morning trying to transfer years of photos and files from three old hard drives to her cloud storage account. I watched as she spent hours navigating menus, re-reading help articles, and muttering expletives at her screen. It took the better part of a morning to do something that should have been simple.

The company that made this product is known for having one of the best user experiences in the industry. They are synonymous with simplicity. I use their products every day and genuinely admire them. Which is exactly why this mattered. Even the best companies have blind spots, and the gap between reputation and reality is where users get hurt.

The other detail worth mentioning: she is an executive at that very company.

When users struggle with a digital product, they rarely blame the product. They blame themselves. A capable person sits in front of a screen and thinks, “Why am I not smart enough to figure this out?” That is not frustration. That is self-doubt. And self-doubt is where users give up. They close the tab, put the laptop away, and quietly decide they are the problem. When your customers are defeated, your brand is defeated too.

Every Interaction Is a Brand Event

This is the strongest argument for investing in user experience strategy and rigorous testing: your product’s experience is your brand. Every confusing workflow, every dead-end menu, every moment a user doubts their own competence is a brand event. And brand events compound. The user who felt defeated on Saturday morning does not write a complaint. She simply stops trying. That is the most expensive kind of churn, because you never see it happen.

Eventually, after three calls to the service center, she got it done. But the experience raised a serious question about process. Somewhere in the development of that feature, the team either did not formalize the user scenarios necessary to determine a clear, communicative, and empathetic path to task completion, or they did and failed to act on them. The discipline of user experience requires homework before the build, testing after the build, and continuous refinement based on real user metrics. If any of those steps is missing, even a good product becomes a source of friction.

Methodology Only Gets You So Far

Today’s consumers have become less and less tolerant of digital experiences that don’t work. If users have a tool that frustrates them, they simply find another tool. Most importantly, as the digital tools we use become increasingly complex, there is an ever-increasing need to link seemingly simple screen interactions with the complex engineering environment necessary to deliver our on-screen promises.

The best UX work I have seen begins and ends with empathy, and with a simple belief: good user experience makes people just a little happier every day. It is not only about removing friction. It is about giving users a sense of accomplishment, a feeling that the tool respected their time and intelligence. That belief drives the methodology: sitting with real users, closely following their engagement with the product, asking questions, conducting interviews, and reading between the lines to find where the subtle misses are. I have watched teams travel the world to sit beside users and observe them in context. Often, the difference between a good experience and a bad one comes down to something small: the placement of a button, the length of a content field, the color of a header, the way a search result is displayed. But it takes real skill to see those things. It takes the discipline to ask the second and third and fourth question and get to the bottom of the real issue.

User stories are the foundation. Every interaction with a digital product can be mapped to a detailed scenario. The UX team’s job is to anticipate everything a user might want to do, then work hand in hand with the engineering team to determine the most efficient path from intent to completion. The two disciplines are inseparable. As digital products grow more complex, the need to bridge simple screen interactions with the complex engineering underneath becomes the central design challenge.

User experience is half science and half art. It is both empirical and intuitive. There are tools to be used, methodologies to be employed, theories to be tested, and data to be gathered. But great UX work is also found in the character of the people doing it: whether they listen, whether they notice nuance, whether they care enough about the right answer to keep asking questions after everyone else has moved on. A lot of UX design theory can be taught. The tools for measuring user interaction improve every year. But the one thing that separates excellence from mediocrity, the thing that keeps a capable person from ever feeling defeated by your product, is something that cannot be taught or measured. Talent.

Let’s go be great.

– Don Shula

I’ve been unusually contemplative this week, turning things over in ways that feel different from my normal pattern of analysis. I am keenly aware that time is marching on even though each day is bleeding into the next. I find myself vacillating between forgetting which day of the week it is and being shocked by the news of the world into higher states of consciousness. One moment I’m drifting through the day on autopilot, comfortably numb in the routine of busyness, and the next I’m jolted awake by some insight that demands my full attention. That oscillation between sleepwalking and sudden clarity is what I want to talk about, because I think most of us live there without naming it.

It seems trite and selfish in the midst of a global crisis to spend time focusing on myself, but this question of my purpose keeps resonating through my thought process. Since I was very young, I’ve made a deliberate effort to monitor my internal dialogue. The narrative in my head has been a source of suffering at times, but also great insight. I share this with you because it’s my hope that each of you uses this gift of extra time to seek answers to some lingering questions in your life. Open the door as the moments of awareness present themselves and just sit with the questions.

As a young teenager, I was very interested in philosophy and religion. Call it divine intervention or good fortune, I met a man named Don Williams who became a mentor and a second father to me. Don has a Ph.D. in world religions, a Master of Divinity, has written a dozen books, and wrote the articles of faith for the Vineyard Church. He became famous as a young pastor in the late sixties for giving a sermon called the “The Gospel According to Bob Dylan,” which drew over 3,500 attendees to the Hollywood Presbyterian Church. If you’re interested in learning more about Don, check out documentary on Amazon called Salt and the Light.

The reason that I bring up Don is that I spent a lot of time with him contemplating the meaning of life and how various religions approached the concepts of enlightenment and salvation. As a teenager, Don played a critical role in shaping my thinking and how to consider larger life questions. We had a very Socratic relationship; he would give me books to read and then we’d talk about them. There is consistently a thematic approach across all these religions and books which is the idea of life as a practice. A practice being a set of meditations/prayers, a demonstration of values, daily activities, and habits. The point being is that you set your life’s course and incorporate the concept of practice into your daily life. More easily said than done for sure, but it has been a guiding life strategy for me. It’s another reason I wrote out the company values for my company before I even began building the business plan.

The people I admire most in my life, my heroes, are people who have struggled to live their life as a practice in service of a higher calling.

Purpose tells you where to aim. Practice is how you walk there every day. Don Williams gave me the first; Don Shula showed me the second.

This same principle applies to our professional lives. Every day at work is a practice. Every project, every client conversation, every decision is an opportunity to pursue excellence. You don’t achieve perfection, but the discipline of defining what great looks like and then pursuing it relentlessly is what separates the good from the exceptional. The organizations and people I admire most don’t stumble into greatness. They practice it, every single day.

This week Don Shula passed away. He was the coach of the Miami Dolphins and led the team to the only undefeated season in NFL history. It’s an unparalleled achievement in a team sport. Certainly, this accomplishment is the headline of his life’s work, but it belies the mythology of success in our culture today. Success is not found. It’s not luck, and it’s not the façade presented on social media. Success is a way of life, it’s a practice.

Don Shula presented at a Microsoft event I attended. It was a great speech, all about the pursuit of perfection and the importance of practice… practice, practice, practice. When most NFL teams were practicing once per day, Shula had the Dolphins practicing three times a day. I was thrilled to hear from him but not as thrilled as my mentor from Microsoft, Jason, who grew up in Miami and has been a lifelong Dolphins fan. Jason had the honor of escorting Don Shula and his wife throughout the event.

My friend from Microsoft, Jason, shared a story with me this week that sums up the essence of Shula’s life and the main point of this essay. The speech kicked off at 8 AM sharp and there was a rehearsal scheduled for 5 AM. A Vice President from HP was going to introduce Shula, it was all written out and very specific. Sure enough, 5 AM came rolling around and the VP was a no show. Shula lost his temper and demanded that someone go get the VP out of bed and get him to the stage ASAP to practice. Disheveled and barely awake the VP arrived and gave a very poor first dry run. The VP had clearly not practiced and was expecting to just wing it. Shula angrily turned to the team of people prepping the event, including Jason and said, “and that is why we fucking practice!”

We all face challenges in our lives. The point of practice is not to start when the challenge arrives, by then it’s too late. Practice is what you do every day so that when difficulty comes, you’re ready. You may be practicing something you’ve done all your life, or something entirely new, and it’s frustrating to not get it quite right. That’s not what matters. It’s the effort, determination, and dedication to a constant pursuit of excellence that counts. Practice is a way of life.

Let’s go be great.

— Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

The Keyword Illusion

All of us have grown up in a world where keywords are the basis for search and advertising. It is everywhere and embedded in everything we do. The device does not matter. The software platform does not matter. The paradigm is the same. You open a search bar, type in some keywords or phrases, and hope you find what you are looking for.

In the world of unlimited computing power and artificial intelligence, this should not be the best we can do. Computer science was never supposed to be built on hope, guessing, or tricking people to click on something that was not exactly what they were looking for. Consider the absurdity of the current paradigm. You ask a direct question and receive a series of answers, half of which are self-serving, the other half close to what you needed, but only if you asked the question perfectly. If that were a conversation with your doctor, you would never go back.

A New Way of Solving the Problem

We tolerate inaccurate, disingenuous search because it is the current paradigm. We are used to it. But familiarity is not the same as adequacy. To drive real change, not just an evolution of technology, you need a fundamentally new way of solving the problem. Immanuel Kant used the phrase “revolution of the way of thinking” (Revolution der Denkart) in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. He was describing the kind of shift that Greek mathematics brought to geometry and Newtonian physics brought to the natural sciences. Not an incremental improvement, but a complete reframing of what the discipline could be.

What the Industry Must Build

The current search paradigm is insufficient, and the industry knows it. The question is whether the next generation of tools will be another incremental improvement or something genuinely new. I believe the answer lies in a combination of disciplines that have been developing in parallel but have never been properly integrated: ontologies, the semantic web, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Together, these fields offer a way to move beyond keyword matching and toward systems that actually understand what a person is asking and why.

No single discipline will solve this problem. Ontologists cannot build it without engineers. Linguists cannot train it without data scientists. Designers cannot shape it without understanding the underlying knowledge architecture.

The revolution Kant described, the shift from accumulating answers to restructuring the question, requires interdisciplinary teams willing to work at the boundaries of their expertise. The future of search, and of information itself, belongs to the organizations that build these teams: groups where computer scientists sit alongside linguists, where taxonomists collaborate with machine learning engineers, where user researchers inform the ontology.

This is not a technology problem. It is a team-building problem. And the organizations that recognize this first will change the relationship between people and information forever.

Let’s go be great.

— Benjamin Franklin

The Energy of Not Knowing

Think back to your early twenties and the experience of looking for a job. The questions were enormous. What is my future going to be? Will I be successful, fall in love, buy a house, have children? You had a lot of unknowns and a lot of big decisions ahead of you. Now that I am a little older, I want to remind you that at that age, you also had a lot of energy. Exciting and heady times for everyone.

A really big question looming in your life at that time was probably what your career is going to be. You sort of know what you like, and you have ambition, although how much is not always clear. So you go job hunting, talk to your friends, and try to find a place where the work is interesting and the people are good. I remember one of our earliest employees telling me she decided to join the company after seeing photos from our first Christmas party, we were giving away iPads at a whisky bar in DC. She thought to herself, that looks like a cool place to work. At that stage in life, most of us are looking for exactly that: somewhere cool where you can learn a lot.

Where It Started

Most people do not know this about me, but early in my life I was on staff at a Presbyterian church as a youth director. I did not have the job for a long time, but it had a lasting impact on me. I was responsible for the middle schoolers, sixth grade through ninth grade. It is a really tough age, full of changes and confusion about everything. I loved working with kids at that stage because it was not too late to keep them off bad paths. The moral compass can be unsteady at that age, and sometimes a young person just needs someone to talk to. Someone to keep them from getting in with the wrong crowd, doing drugs, committing crimes or worse. They are just trying to figure out how to grow up.

That is where I first learned how much I loved teaching and helping people. It is the most rewarding thing I have done in my career, more than all of the other successes and by some measure. Helping people grow and mature is my life’s calling. It is why I started my company. The idea was simple: if we could bring together a group of smart and happy people, we could make a hugely positive impact on the world. We would learn together, focus on something noble, and try to make millions of people a little bit happier every day.

The Privilege of the Long Road

It has been a long road. Building a company is not a straight line, and the lessons do not arrive on schedule. But the thing I am most proud of, looking back, is not the contracts we won or the technology we built. It is the people who came through our doors as junior consultants and left as leaders. That is the return on investment that no balance sheet captures.

Every experienced professional carries something that no training program can replicate: perspective. You know what it feels like to fail on a deadline, to recover a client relationship, to sit in a meeting where you were the least experienced person in the room and learn something that changed the way you work. That perspective is not just valuable. It is an obligation. If someone gave you a chance early in your career, the best way to honor that investment is to give someone else the same opportunity.

Let’s go be great.

— Muhammad Ali, The Soul of a Butterfly

Organized to Serve Themselves

The culture of customer experience is still forming. A few companies have been grounded in customer service for decades, but they remain outliers. Most large companies are organized to serve themselves while providing a service or product to the market. The customer, when considered at all, lives inside one division: sales or marketing.

In the experience economy, the entire organization needs to be designed to serve customers and deliver a shareable experience. Everyone in the company must understand the real value of a consumer spending their money and time interacting with a brand. I used to say that all companies were becoming publishers whether they wanted to or not. I think the reality is larger than that. With the proliferation of connections between people and the speed of communication through technology, all companies are now experience providers.

When Design Had a Face

For many years, the experience was managed by a dedicated division within the Fortune 500. These teams designed the in-store, in-branch, or in-restaurant experience to be visually appealing, memorable, and efficient. The layout helped consumers know where to stand in line, where to get help, where to find specific products. And when the design fell short, it was staffed with friendly people who could fill the gaps: providing a personalized experience, building a personal rapport. If the design wasn’t quite right, the human connection made up the difference.

Technology has replaced many of these branches, stores, and human touch points, partly because it is more cost effective, partly because consumers chose speed and convenience. In response, large companies have tried to fill the gaps with a series of technology and marketing projects. But a serialized set of projects never produces the harmony and richness of the experience a consumer demands. When I hear large companies describe their digital transformation efforts, they sound like a symphony written by a series of committees, each focused only on the instrument they play.

The Promise of Personalization

It is the whole experience, in all its dimensions, that needs to be addressed. For a large company, this demands an almost unachievable level of organizational alignment. Most companies have been built over decades. The divisions, operating principles, and culture cannot be rewired overnight. The value of transformation is well understood, but adoption follows the standard distribution curve: early adopters take a leap of faith, and the majority waits until the leverage point becomes clear. In some cases, though, adoption can be accelerated when a killer application emerges.

In the case of digital transformation, the killer application is personalization. Delivering experience in context, relevant and tailored to the individual, is the key to moving an organization forward. It may take a decade or more for a Fortune 500 company to fully reorganize around the customer. But personalization lets you deliver value today, even while the larger transformation is still underway.

Companies that spent decades building around 20th century models can still recognize immediate value. Technology can recreate what the front line staff once provided: helping customers find what they need, answering questions, and building a sense of intimacy between consumer and brand. The organizational change will take time. The experience does not have to wait.

Let’s go be great.

What I Believe

I have been thinking about leadership, what it means, what it demands, and how rarely it looks the way people expect. We have some big rocks to move, and I need everyone focused and determined about doing what is best for the business. The leadership and organizational system we are building rests on a foundation of beliefs that serve as guiding principles for how we approach our work.

While some of what follows may seem directed at executives or managers, the truth is that all of us are leaders. We lead our clients and one another through change, every day.

I believe that:

• Authority is earned, not granted.

• Real leadership is about serving people, not ruling them.

• Our job as leaders is to do for people only what they cannot do for themselves.

• We get the behavior that we inspect, not what we expect.

• Every interaction is a teachable moment. Use them.

• If the leaders cannot solve problems together, the team never will.

With that as a backdrop, let me share the ideas and stories behind the management philosophy I want to build.

The First Rule

The first rule, above all others, is that each member of the team acts in the interest of others above self. You will be successful because you help other people become great. Zig Ziglar, the legendary sales trainer, said it simply: “You get what you want by helping other people get what they want.”

When I worked at Nordstrom, if you saw a messy table as you walked by, you jumped in and cleaned it up. It did not matter if it was your department or your job. We all pitched in because serving customers was our priority, and a messy store was a poor reflection on all of us. What was remarkable was the sense of pride we had. I would like each of you to start acting in a manner that instills that same sense of pride, making our customer experience, your first priority.

The Gift Wrapping Station

I remember being fifteen years old at the men’s sportswear gift wrapping station, a week or so before Christmas. I had a huge line. Customers were getting grumpy. I was overwhelmed and stressed. I did not have the experience at that time to know what I should do or even how to ask for help. I was suffering in silence. So were our customers.

The next thing I know, two people appeared and started helping me. We spent the next few hours wrapping Christmas presents. I actually started to have fun. The customers were happy. The Christmas spirit began to take hold.

The two people who helped me were Jamie Baugh, president of Nordstrom, and John Nordstrom. I had no idea who they were or how important they were. I just needed help. They walked by, saw a huge line, rolled up their sleeves, and started working.

There was no recrimination, no lengthy discussion. We were busy, which was a good thing. There were customers and employees who needed to be taken care of. Jamie and Mr. John introduced themselves afterward, and I was amazed that they had simply jumped in. Do you think I ever forgot that taking care of customers and employees was my top priority? Later in my career, when Mr. John would visit with me, I took enormous pride in making sure that my teams and I were delivering customer service consistent with the standard he had set.

How many of our teammates are struggling right now and need someone to jump in? In my mind, we are not here to manage the experience we deliver to our customers. We are here to model it for our teams, to teach them how to be great by doing the work with them, so that they can be stewards of our clients, our brand, and our company.

The Power of How You Communicate

I had a peer 360 review a number of years ago and was subject to significant criticism for my lack of communication skills. I found this hard to believe. As a salesperson, communication is my primary tool, and I had built a career on it. What I came to understand is that the deficit was not in my clarity or word choices but in the style I used to convey expectations.

I believe it is my job to point out what needs to be accomplished, not to tell people how to do it. Then, to challenge the plan that has been created to achieve the goal. When I say “challenge,” I mean asking a lot of questions to ensure that you have thought through all the details, that you have taken the time to apply critical thinking not only to how you will achieve the goal, but to whether the goal is even the right one in the first place.

You may have noticed that I keep an hourglass on my desk. Time is our most precious resource, and it is there to remind me of that every day. Every assignment or objective should be pursued with a specific tempo in mind. If for some reason the timing has not been conveyed, you should ask.

If you tell someone how to do something, you have stripped them of their genius, their creativity, and their power. That feels like a moral failure to me. This is not to say you should easily be dissuaded from an idea or an opinion. Quite the contrary. It means you should challenge your team to own their point of view, so that you might be persuaded and inspired by their brilliance. The question is not whether you are right. The question is whether we are executing on the right plan. That is why the sequence matters: the quality of your planning, the chance to debate it, and a clear understanding of when you will be done.

Making Bets

You cannot really tell how strong a person or a team is until they endure hardship. As a buyer at Nordstrom, you had to place orders for merchandise six to nine months in advance. Inventories were set as a fixed ratio to sales. When business was good, better than plan, you would run out of merchandise. When it was slow, inventory would start to back up. Being under-bought and over-bought were both sins, but not equally measured. I saw many buyers get fired for being over-bought. Very few, if any, for being under-bought. Every order placed was a gamble on the business. I became very comfortable living in a world where I had to make bets every day.

I was not comfortable because all my bets were good or because my predictions were accurate. By nature, I am an optimistic person, and I usually see nothing but opportunity. Life does not always work that way. I was successful because I followed the trends and became comfortable in my ability to react to market conditions. I would get out and personally sell the slow merchandise, or negotiate reduced orders from suppliers ahead of a downturn. When business was booming, I would cut deals to deliver merchandise earlier than scheduled. I always found a way to right-size and grow the business. There is always a way. I believe that in my heart.

I do not expect you to be comfortable making bets, but I expect you to make them. To make decisions for the business in advance of the need and to stand behind those decisions. To be willing to stand for what you believe in, and to be humble and learn when your bet does not work. Pushing yourself to see down the road will make you a good leader. How can anyone follow you if you do not have a vision and a long-term plan? What needs to happen for our business to become a great customer experience agency? What is not figured out? Where do you need to invest time and intellectual capital?

Team Above Self

When you place your teammates, employees, and customers above yourself, prioritization becomes easier. It is counterintuitive. You feel like you were hired to accomplish a mission, to get something done for the company. You are right, you were. The question is: what is the method for achieving that goal? It is teamwork. You need to be trusted to be a member of a team. When someone believes you are just out for yourself, or that you do not care about them personally, they will not trust you.

While we need an org chart and we need to continue adding structure and processes to the company, those things must be in service to our employees and customers, not tools to resolve conflicts or create tiebreakers within the team. The only thing that matters is how well you are taking care of your peers, employees, and customers. You do not need an org chart to do that. You can help each other every day in many ways.

I remember my Merchandise Manager pulling me aside one day, a few months into my first management job, to have the big talk. He told me a story about how great generals lead their armies into battle. They do not sit in some comfortable tower and tell people to go to war. They are the first to charge, not the last. He was telling me that I needed to lead by example, demonstrating the values of the company. He was a good man who was trying to get my attention, just as I am trying to get yours.

That is where a company worth caring about comes from. We are in the people business. We all freely give our time and intellectual capital to help achieve a common goal. No one does it just for the money. We all want a leader who will teach us and make us great. There is a quote on my desk from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.” Let us be that for one another.

The Work Ahead

We have ambitious goals and big challenges. We need everyone working together to be successful. We need to organize a fast-growing company while inventing methodologies and solving problems that are fundamental to customer experience management.

I want to be part of a great team and company, one that enables change so that our clients can transform the way they interact with their customers. The act of trade and commerce is a powerful and uniquely human experience. Every day we make choices with our time and money based on relationships and expectations. Personalizing that experience is a good start toward our longer-term vision. Let us help our clients wow their customers.

Let’s go be great.