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Customer-Centricity, Employee-Centricity

March 21, 2023

There are business leaders in every industry who have made their careers and built competitive advantage for their companies by devoting their time and attention to being great at customer-centricity. There are business leaders —especially with HR responsibilities— in every industry who have made their companies employers of choice by devoting their time and attention to being great at employee-centricity. In a time of rapidly changing customer expectations, thinking deeply about the needs and wants of the people who buy what your business offers can be the difference between success and failure. In a time of rapidly changing employee expectations,…

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BLOG

Institutional Knowledge Retention in a Time of High Turnover

March 16, 2023

We all know a ‘go-to person’ at work. They are competent, hard-working, knowledgeable, experienced. They are who you rely upon when you have questions or need results. Sometimes we refer to these people as Top Talent, but there are also all kinds of rank-and-file employees who are the difference-makers in everything they do without being interested in climbing corporate ladders. Whatever we call them, leaders depend on them. Teams revolve around them. Businesses would struggle to function without them. When ‘The Great Resignation’ was all anyone could talk about and ‘Talent Retention’ became something every organization focused on, all of…

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BLOG, LIFE SCIENCES

A Focus on the Fundamentals During the Fastest Growth in the History of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

March 14, 2023

How fast is too fast when we are talking about the future of medicine? This is not a new question, but it is being asked at a time of unprecedented change and at the tipping point of a whole new generation of products starting to enter commercialization. Between Cell and Gene Therapy, mRNA vaccine technology, and the full width and breadth of other R&D efforts across the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical space, the drug development pipeline has grown from 11 to 21 percent since the global pandemic with no sign of slowing down. All this is happening during a time of…

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BLOG, SUPPLY CHAIN — NA

The Career Path of a Senior Supply Chain Executive

March 9, 2023

I imagine a lot of people who read this blog series also listen to our podcast series. There is a lot of connective tissue between the two in terms of content and intended audience, and of course much of what I talk about there will influence what I write here. Today I want to share something great that came up during a prep call for a future podcast interview. Now I was not recording the conversation, but this is less about quoting someone and more about walking through a way of visualizing and thinking about something that I found really…

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Embracing Equity: What we can learn from International Women’s Day 2023

March 8, 2023

“There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.” – Michelle Obama March 8 marks International Women’s Day (IWD) 2023, a day to reflect on the barriers facing women and the changes we can make for a better tomorrow. Each year, the IWD foundation works to celebrate women’s achievements, raise awareness for discrimination, and educate others on how to take action against inequality. As a recent grad just starting my career, this day inspires a good amount of contemplation of the past. Had it been 50 years ago, how would my life have looked? Would I have gone…

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BLOG, FOOD SAFETY & QUALITY

Demonstrating the ROI of FSQ Digitization

March 2, 2023

One of the great challenges of Food Safety and Quality professionals is connecting what they do to the bottom line of the company, especially when they are advocating for new tools and capabilities. We have discussed this briefly before in an earlier blog post. While FSQ is vital to the success of every business that works with food, it is not a profit generator or a competitive advantage. There is also a natural and deep-seated conservatism in tinkering with what already works among the people responsible for safeguarding what we eat and drink. All this adds up to it being…

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BLOG

Does Daylight Saving Time Make Business Sense?

February 27, 2023

We are less than two weeks out from a biannual exercise that everyone seems to enjoy more by complaining about the process rather than from any benefits derived from it. As happens every time this comes around on the calendar, a lot of virtual ink is going to be spilled on what it is, why we do it, and who actually benefits from it. I thought I would do all that with a business spin at the end, in keeping with this blog’s mission statement and intended audience. What is Daylight Saving Time (DST)? Why do we do it, and…

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Supply Chain Jargon for the Supply Chain Adjacent

February 23, 2023

Every business that buys something, sells something, or moves something has a supply chain organization. The people who spend their working lives making things arrive where and when they are needed in the quantity and quality expected are professionals, and like most professions they have developed their own vocabulary for what they are doing and what they are thinking. Today’s blog post is not for those people. For most of my columns I try to write for as many of the people in Executive Platforms’ network as possible, and supply chain leaders are probably the single largest demographic who engage…

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BLOG

The Four-Day Workweek as Another Addition to the New Normal of Work?

February 21, 2023

I want to start today’s article with a confession. I had never worked from home a day in my life until COVID-19, but now that I am in a hybrid model where I’m only in the office a couple of times a week I don’t want to ever go back to the way things were before. I am not alone. For almost two years now, survey after survey has said employees in white collar jobs discovered they liked WFH/WFA/Hybrid models a lot more than the Monday to Friday 9 to 5 of pre-pandemic times. We went through a phase we…

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Building Towards Long-Term Goals in a Quarterly Report World

February 16, 2023

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it has been under construction every day for centuries. So many of the issues we talk about at Executive Platforms events, in this blog, and through our podcast need to be discussed within the framework of a journey, because the destination is not something that will be reached in a matter of days, or weeks, or months, or even years. In many cases organizations commit themselves to a journey knowing from the very beginning that there will never be a stopping point. A Journey of Continuous Improvement, for example, is the commitment to…

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How Does Edge Computing Fit into the Larger Digital Revolution?

February 14, 2023

We write a lot about digital transformations on this blog. We also talk about it a great deal in our podcast episodes, and the speaker faculties of our events always have a lot to say about it too. I sometimes worry that there’s not a lot left to say in this space without getting into specifics that by their very nature start excluding people. No one case study or example can cover everything or speak to everyone, right? Then this morning I was reading something about Edge Computing, and it occurred to me while I have heard people talk about…

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BLOG, Sustainability

NASRS23 in a Nutshell

February 8, 2023

The 2023 edition of the North American Sustainability & Responsibility Summit ran January 30th through February 1st at the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines outside Austin, Texas. It was attended by 410 delegates, speakers, sponsor representatives, and guests from almost two hundred different companies and organizations. The agenda included more than fifty keynotes, case studies, workshops, roundtable discussions, and more. In the days after the event, feedback has been universally positive, and work is already underway to make the 2024 edition of the series event bigger and better. That is the shortest overview we can offer of the event. Here is…

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BLOG

A Checklist for Successful Digital Transformations

January 19, 2023

I’m a copywriter. I love synonyms. When there’s more than one way to say a thing, it gives me options to talk about the same ideas and concepts different ways without repeating myself too often. The Digital Revolution, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, or The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been a boon for business copywriters. It has been less of a boon for the people responsible for effectively delivering on its promises. Now that may seem unfair at first. Enormous corporate empires and entire professions have risen in the last few decades on the promise…

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Building Sustainability into Corporate Culture

January 12, 2023

Unilever is one of the world’s largest multinational consumer goods companies. From food and refreshments, to home care, to beauty & personal care products, if you are not using a Unilever brand, you are using a Unilever competitor who very much has Unilever in mind when it chooses how to source, make, distribute, market, and deliver its products. Unilever is an industry leader and a trendsetter whose business decisions reverberate across economies. Unilever is also committed to being a Sustainability-focused company. They have spoken about it a number of times at Executive Platforms events, and they are very happy to…

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BLOG

The R-Word that Rhymes with Succession

January 6, 2023

There is a not-so-fun phrase you hear a lot when pundits talk about the state of the current economy. “We’re probably in a recession right now.” It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the pundits’ understanding of the facts on the ground, does it? Having teed myself up, I guess I should say we’re probably in a recession right now, but this one is starting off unevenly, which gives businesses a chance to think through some of the things they want to put in place before the worst of it hits. What Exactly is a Recession? Let’s begin by…

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BLOG

Our Favorite Interviews of 2022

December 22, 2022

It’s the end of another year and a fine time to begin a new tradition: Let’s look back at some of our favorite interviews that we have done in 2022, and maybe something will catch your eye that you did not see the first time around! A couple of things to say at the top? First, the episodes we want to feature in this article are chosen based on things about them I remember fondly and want to highlight when I think of the year gone by, not any particular hard and fast metrics. Second, because of some ambitious plans…

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