The five principles of retail. If you are running a retail business — whether bricks and mortar or online — there are five core principles you need to adhere to.
From customer care to the four Ps, Antony Welfare, author of The Retail Inspector’s Handbook, explains what you need to know 1 The customer is the most important person in your business The customer holds the key to every successful retail operation.
IP & Trademark. McKinseyInnovation. Competing on Talent Analytics. Do you think you know how to get the best from your people?
Or do you know? How do investments in your employees actually affect workforce performance? Who are your top performers? How can you empower and motivate other employees to excel? Leading-edge companies are increasingly adopting sophisticated methods of analyzing employee data to enhance their competitive advantage.
Harrah’s Entertainment is well-known for employing analytics to select customers with the greatest profit potential and to refine pricing and promotions for targeted segments. For example, Harrah’s used metrics to evaluate the effects of its health and wellness programs on employee engagement and the bottom line. At Best Buy the value of a 0.1% increase in employee engagement at a particular store is $100,000. Here’s how other organizations use analytics to improve their management of human capital:
40% of Americans Now Make Less Than 1968 Minimum Wage. You may have seen charts like the one to the right from the Economic Policy Institute, showing how working people’s wages stopped going up along with productivity gains.
This means the gains went…somewhere else. See if you can guess who got them? (Hint: it’s the 1 percent; this is one driver of the terrible income and wealth inequality.) This breakoff of wages from productivity growth is partly the result of trade agreements that pit Americans against exploited workers in non-democracies. This weakened the bargaining power of unions, moved factories and industries out of the country, devastated entire regions of our country — and gave the giant multinational corporations, Wall Street and the billionaires the leverage they needed.
Economist Dean Baker describes one effect of this in Minimum Wage: Who Decided Workers Should Fall Behind? “If the minimum wage had risen in step with productivity growth [since 1968], it would be over $16.50 an hour today. Fix The Trade Deficit, Fix The Economy. From the bleeding edge: 10 must-read scientific research papers on conversion rate optimization « Wingify Conversion Optimization Blog.
Scientific research papers on how to increase sales or conversions are rare.
Most of the articles you read on the Internet (admittedly, including a lot of posts on this blog as well) are based on what the writer thinks and what makes logical sense. But scientific research works in a different way. Authors of research papers must produce accurate, reproducible results. And their articles are reviewed by peers before getting published. Hence in most cases you can always trust results of a scientific paper.
Our history in depth – Company – Google. How Small-Town Customs Are Transforming Grand Rapids Into An Innovation Hub. “In America, the West was about opportunity.
In Michigan, it still is.” It’s a bold statement to be sure, but it's one that The Right Place, a western Michigan economic development organization, along with other officials and investors based in Greater Grand Rapids, are serious about making a reality. Western Michigan still vibrates with the hum of the Motor City and its auto manufacturing cluster, but it is also home to companies such as Perrigo, Herman Miller, Steelcase, and Amway, which flog everything from software to health care products. Demand for “Dragon’s Milk,” among other craft beers from New Holland Brewing Company, was the juice needed to power a $3 million expansion of its existing production plant, while Lacks Enterprises (makers of shiny chrome fittings for cars and appliances) is spending $31.9 million to build a new facility here. Johnston, the lead user experience designer at Universal Mind, is developing an app called One Second Epic.
37signals Earns Millions Each Year. Its CEO’s Model? His Cleaning Lady. Spanx's Sara Blakely: Turning $5,000 into $1 billion with panties. Sara Blakely is the founder of Spanx, a hosiery company present in 50 countriesHer business idea was sparked in 1998 from "the way her butt looked in white pants"Blakely was crowned America's youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes magazineShe attributes her success to extraordinary perseverance, salesmanship and risk-taking.
China's weird and wildly popular world of workplace novels. Page turner: Workplace novels sell in the millions in China with their mix of soap opera plots and career advice.
Hundreds of titles crowd the "workplace" genre in China's bookstoresAppeal lies in the books' mix of soap opera plots and career adviceBooks provide information for aspiring careerists, says novelist Genre fails to pay attention to more positive cultural values, says literature professor (CNN) -- In 2009, Lu Qi, an author of martial arts novels, published his first book on a slightly different type of combat sport: office politics in China.
The book, titled "Hidden in the Office," contains 23 rules for getting ahead in the workplace.