In our peer groups it’s normal that we from time to time take a departure from the all the digital talk, and shift to a career perspective. Questions and personal reflections about roles and tenure are frequent. In particular after 5+ years at the same company, the joking begins that either you leave now or you are staying for life. From time to time, there’s also members wondering whether to make a big career change
New York City-based John Stepper stayed for an impressive 18+ years in management roles at Deutsche Bank and then his career took a turn.
Back in 2015, he published his now seminal book Working Out Loud and then bravely left the bank in 2016 to go pursue his dream of making work better and improving the social bond at work based on what he wrote in the book.
Read moreCan you imagine a career starting with secretarial duties back in the 80’s, followed by 10 years at GSK as Executive Administrator, onwards to working in internal communications, speaking at international conferences on better ways of working and now being a certified Microsoft 365 MVP since 2017?
This is the inspiring journey that Lesley Crook has been on and since 2021, she is working with Norwegian Microsoft Partner and IT services firm CloudWay.
Her focus has always been on better ways of working and today she is preparing customers for Microsoft Viva and Teams cloud consumption. In her role, she gets to use her background with internal communications, alongside her deep understanding on how large, complex and global organisations actually works.
Read more“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for”
Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker is one of the most widely-known and influential thinkers on management and his opening quote is really an eloquent way of saying that the customer's experience and perception of the service or product is what ultimately defines its quality.
Peter Drucker also coined the term “knowledge worker” and that’s really what Gudrun Möller, Service Designer at Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) in Zurich, Switzerland is. Her focus is along the same lines as Drucker on using research data to focus on delivering value to customers and testing, testing, testing.
Prior to joining ZKB 2021, Gudrun has worked on both customer side and with a consulting firm in various roles including Senior Digital Media Manager at Swiss Re, Head of Digital Product Management at Neue Zürcher Zeitung and also as Senior Consultant at Stimmt, a boutique Swiss business consulting firm focusing on customer experience.
Gudrun is also our expert of the month.
Read moreDeveloping and running one of higher education's first Marketing Operations teams is something special.
That’s what Eric Greenberg has done in Philadelphia at The Wharton School since around 2013, when he began championing the growth of inbound marketing in the MarComm office after having spent several years in the department of web development.
Today, Eric runs a team of nine people at The Wharton School that covers a wide variety of scenarios. They run the Wharton content management system which has 130 websites on it, they are responsible for marketing automation and the graduate admissions Salesforce instance, as well as a school-wide email marketing platform.
Eric believes in “servant leadership”, mentoring, sharing knowledge, and creating a healthy workplace culture and a team that respects diverse opinions and works together to achieve amazing things. Eric is also our expert of the month.
Read more“We are just at the beginning of seeing the practical application of AI in digital marketing.”
Andreas Ramos is a true Silicon Valley legend and when I recently spoke to him, he was just wrapping up his slides on what is probably the first university lecture on Using AI for Digital Marketing.
Andreas moved to Silicon Valley in 1992, has worked in engineering at SGI, SUN Microsystems and other companies. He did translations and localisation in six languages before joining as head of a digital agency, where he worked with Global Fortune 200 clients. Later he led global SEO at Cisco, where he worked in 44 languages in 86 countries.
Today, he’s the author of 22+ books (he stopped counting), several of them Amazon #1 Best Sellers, and also an instructor in digital marketing at Omnes Education, one of France's leading schools for management and communications.
Read moreIf you follow the news, even just a bit, you can easily get the impression that we live in an age of self-centeredness and are more focused on our own success than helping others.
In her work as the Alumni Communications & Digital Marketing Officer at Imperial College London, one of the UK’s leading science-based institutions, Tina Schmechel gets to work with graduates from a variety of backgrounds and walks of life. Her experience is the exact opposite: people are supporting, encouraging and giving their time, energy and enthusiasm.
Tina has been with Imperial since just before the COVID-19 pandemic and previously worked in marketing roles in the high-end fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and luxury sectors, both in the UK and abroad. A journalist-turned-marketer, she’s authored one of Time Out’s most read articles on the 10 best rooftop bars in Barcelona and she wrote her thesis at Berlin’s Humboldt University on Banksy, the famous unknown street artist.
Tina is our expert of the month.
Read moreSusan Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology from way back when most people did not interact with a computer.
Back then, Susan also took a course in computer programming and these were the days with cards and card readers. One day, while programming, the card came back with ‘Job aborted’ and this made Susan think:
“How’s anyone going to understand what that means”
When speaking to Susan, this is the beginning of interest in the field of what was then called human factors and designing tech to better fit us humans. Initially she didn’t know human factors in computers existed, but now many years later she can look back at a career that has taken her onwards in a field later known as man machine interaction, then it became known as usability and today simply referred to as user experience.
Susan is the CEO at The Team W, a services firm focused on behavioral science. She’s also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and How To Get People To Do Stuff. She’s also our expert of the month.
Read moreDo you remember plasma globes? Mainly used back in school as a fun thing in physics and also known for the tricks that can be performed on them by users moving their hands around them.
To Nicole France, content is similar to that old invention by Nikola Tesla when he was experimenting with high-frequency electric currents in a glass vacuum tube. Content also has tremendous energy and it can go in all kinds of directions. It’s something everybody think they can play with and certainly have an opinion about, but it takes quite some work to make something useful out of it.
Nicole has a background as an analyst with both Gartner and Constellation Research, she’s also been almost 6 years with Fujitsu, worked in both the US and Europe and now she’s Evangelist, Director of Content at Contentful.
She’s also our expert of the month.
Read moreWhen it comes to digital, the museum community has repeatedly delivered engaging initiatives at the very forefront of innovation.
Still, when you go explore in the big sea of arts, history and culture and plan how to communicate and deliver a new exhibition, you can easily find yourself in seemingly uncharted territory, also when it comes to the use of emerging consumer technology.
Jennifer Snyder is Chief Digital Officer at Detroit Institute of Arts and has over a decade of experience in digital leadership roles in the museum world, including at SFMOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s one of many accomplished museum visionaries that are making museums an unexpected place for early indicators of what’s next.
Jennifer is also our expert of the month.
Read more“Making sustainable digital services is not a tool or code problem - it requires us to human better”
With this thought-provoking quote, Hannah Smith set the stage in her highly rated talk at the HE Connect 22 conference in Manchester.
Hannah is the Operations and Training Manager for the Green Web Foundation, a non-profit with a clear mission: to make the internet fossil free by 2030. Her role is to ensure operations within the organisation are running smoothly, especially as they grow beyond start-up phase. Previously she was a freelance WordPress developer and speaker.
She’s based in Porlock, a coastal village in Somerset, England and also our expert of the month.
Read more“Where you are based in the organisation matters much less today”
Do you need more why or are you ready for the how? Adam Feldt is Senior Manager, Digital Communications, Global Marketing and Communications at Topsoe, but as Adam says, titles in digital are of dwindling importance these days. What matters is how you can make an impact, in particular when it comes to sustainability.
Topsoe is a global leader in decarbonization technology, a complex B2B firm based just outside Copenhagen.
Topsoe has just executed a brand refresh to sharpen the focus on how the company is ready to do decarbonization at scale. Actually a brand refresh is some understatement; I would rather label it an award-winning global rebrand, including a complete overhaul of the digital channels. Adam was closely involved in this project as a digital leader and also has a fresh take on what comes next.
Adam is our expert of the month.
Read more“We are stuck in a bad chain of unproductive behaviors”
Coming up on 6 years at Telia in various HR roles, Chris Hovde knows a thing or two about change, culture, productivity and leadership development. Working currently out of his apartment in Oslo as Global People Movement Lead, Chris is now in a global role focusing on building the future leadership and culture of Telia Company.
Previously he has worked on everything from on- and offboarding, employer branding, leadership and development, sustainability, diversity and inclusion. He has a big heart for regenerative workplaces and focuses a lot on healthy work environments, psychological safety and how to live thriving lives. He is a role model for change and a self-proclaimed Urban monk on a mission to create a regenerative world.
Chris is our expert of the month.
Read moreFirst came the Web CMS, then came Headless, and now it’s time for composable
When Sana Remekie talks about the need for marketing to lead the Web or how to navigate the seemingly never ending vendor chaos when building your digital platform, she does so from a strong foundation of understanding how enterprises approach digital and how digital have evolved in the past twenty years.
Sana is the co-founder of Conscia, a Toronto-based enterprise software-as-a-service company that empowers marketers to activate personalized experiences on every channel. They refer to it as connecting the dots with the digital experience graph or to put it another way: Connecting the dots between customer and content in every context.
She’s also recognised as among Canada’s Top 10 Influential Women in Tech and recently became a MACH Ambassador. Sana is our expert of the month.
Read moreAs designers, our purpose should be to design easy-to-use solutions, that don’t require expert users
When I talked to Anja Saabye, she brought up how everyone is busy these days and how time is the limited resource required to move things forward. This calls for solutions that require less effort and ideally no training.
In her view, we can’t expect that customers know everything, yet as she said, too many people who work with user experience forget this great responsibility and place a great burden on their users.
Anja is Head of UX and Product Design, Senior Manager at Universal Robots, where she has been a part of growing the design team. She’s been there for almost 2 years following an extensive agency background and lives privately in Odense, Denmark.
Read moreUsing the presentation title “Strategic creativity in a chaotic world” Hannah Gutkauf travelled to the famous tech fest SXSW in Austin, Texas back in March and gave a talk framed around the Metaverse, but really about all emerging technology at the moment, be it AI, XR or data science.
Working with strategy creativity in a chaotic world is also a fitting title for Hannah’s job as Global Partner & Head of Emerging Tech at the Copenhagen offices of design services firm Manyone.
Hannah is originally from Vienna, studied at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology and before joining the agency world, she worked in luxury fashion and also studied tech at the IT University of Copenhagen. Hannah is a self-proclaimed creative digital technologist and also our expert of the month.
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