As a founding member of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance (on Twitter and LinkedIn), Peppers & Rogers Group has a vested interest in pursuing the issues involved in both customer and employee engagement. Our feeling is that the whole idea of "engaging" customers and employees is something that has become more and more obvious with the increasing use of collaborative technologies, social media, and customer-centric management practices.

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I've been experimenting seriously with Twitter now for about two months. Truth is, I was highly skeptical of its benefits at first, partly because everyone seemed so irrationally ga-ga over it (I am inherently suspicious of fads). But also, puh-lease: 140 characters per tweet? To someone who's made a decent career out of writing 75,000-word books, and who has already written hundreds of articles and blog posts ranging from 300 to 3,000 words each, a 140-character tweet smacks of attention deficit disorder, pure and simple. Also, I've never been big on text messaging, which is where the 140-character limit comes from in the first place. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, I took a Twitter tutorial from one of our Peppers & Rogers Group consultants (thanks to @bcarroll7), I installed Tweetdeck on my laptop, and then I plodded awkwardly off into Twitterland, vowing to dedicate at least a few minutes each morning and evening to monitoring, reacting, and tweeting.

Continue reading "My Adventures in Twitterland: A Two-Month Status Report" »

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An airline executive colleague of ours submitted his resignation the day before his airline reported that its financial results had swung severely down, reversing a previous record of profits and recording a loss described by the trade press as "staggering." The reason for the loss? Fuel hedging. Twelve months ago, when oil was climbing beyond $145 a barrel, and many observers predicted $200 oil by the end of 2008, this airline and others began to hedge their fuel costs against further price increases. Naturally, these contracts were expensive at the time, because no one knew how high oil prices would go, so the financial players selling the options didn't want to lose money any more than the airlines did. But airlines that had successfully hedged in the past were seen as responsibly managing their exposure to commodity price risk.

Continue reading "Fired by Randomness" »

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You know you're in the boondocks when you're in a country where Blackberry messaging doesn't penetrate. Ethiopia, for instance, where I am now, as I write this blog post. My Blackberry works as a phone, but the email doesn't happen.

Continue reading "Hobbyists are the Ultimate Engaged Employees" »

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