SY Partners helps companies facing major transformation. The session was aimed at helping the group push the thinking a little, and we very privileged that Chairman Keith Yamashita flew west to run the session. SYPartners see themselves as consistently choosing to be great, for themselves and for their clients. Keith questioned whether we risk what …
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
BBD CEO Tour: Klutz
Turns out Kiwis buy more Klutz items per capita than anywhere else. They are a toy company that specialises in helping 8-10 year olds build things. Klutz was started by two graduating students with a book on how to juggle attached to juggling balls, and after some wider publicity the sales exploded. After a few …
BBD CEO Tour: Hyatt Santa Clara Lab Hotel
Hyatt have about 500 hotels worldwide. A year ago the CEO saw that they needed an innovation drive, so hired a Chief Innovation Officer who started holding think tank sessions around the world. These brought in a diverse group of people from within Hyatt, their customers and others such as architects. They talked about wide …
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BBD CEO tour: Cisco II
Next up from Cisco was Joanne Bethlahmy Director Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, which is an internal strategy consulting group charged with coming up with provocative ideas challenging business models and approach to customer engagement. They work with customers to do this, combining new strategy approaches with technology. Joanne comes from a FMCG and background. …
BBD CEO Tour: Cisco
Surprisingly Cisco does not offer free wifi to all-comers at their executive sales center. To get on the guest wifi network one needs a ‘Cisco Sponsor’ and have to agree to not ‘create any liability for us or cause use to lose (in whole or in part) the services of our suppliers’, amongst a host …
BBD CEO tour: Intuitive Surgical
Intuitive Surgical makes giant surgical robots (surgeon assistance devices), and is publicly listed, delivering $1.76b of revenue last year. The have 2341 of their systems installed globally, mostly in the US and with 5 in NZ. Their revenue model is clever, with $700m of the total revenue from instruments and accessories, between $1000-2000 per surgery …
BBD CEO tour: Survey Monkey
People use the SurveyMonkey tool for a large number of purposes with performance reviews, training and parent feedback my favorite non-traditional uses that CEO David Goldberg mentioned. The product is easy to use, simple to set up and marketed essentially through word of mouth, mainly through people answering surveys. Easy to use was designed in …
BBD CEO Tour: Google
“We really are in the people business” said David Lawee today to the BBD CEO Study Tour Group at Google. Our study tour group got the standard walk around Google, which starts with free food, and shows the volleyball court, the dinosaur and so on. This wasn’t the real Google though. The real Google is …
BBD CEO tour: IDEO
I’m on the Better by Design CEO Study Tour, visiting a host of companies in the SF Bay area. I’ll try to post notes as I go. IDEO is held up by many of the exemplar of user centered design, and certainly some of their output has shown that. I was a huge fan of …
BNZ homepage login
BNZ, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. Another bank, unsurprisingly it’s BNZ, has followed ASB (and my advice on a prior blog post) and is moving the login to the home page. Good.
Far South
A random picture of me from the Our Far South trip that @ksuyin just posted. And a couple more:
Mapping your Social network
Wolfram Alpha just released a nice statistics pack for analysing your Facebook activity. Simply type “Facebook report” into the search bar, connect to Facebook, register for Wolfram Alpha, wait for minutes between each interaction as Wolfram Alpha is getting hammered at the moment. I’m essentially inactive on Facebook, but did get a couple of nice …
Domain squatting is an asshat thing to do
FamilyFirst.org.nz is anti-gay marriage group with views regarded as despicable by a decent part of New Zealand society. Their website used to be hosted at familyfirst.co.nz, and until recently was redirected from that address. A Hamish Spencer (@hamfritta) purchased the familyfirst.co.nz domain after it expired, and redirected it to pro-gay marriage site marriagequality.co.nz. I regard this as …
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The birds on Tamaki drive
Some pictures from a walk yesterday. Also testing out the Gallery function on WordPress – so do let me know how it resolves.
NZ Government on Investing in shares – some more questions
The NZ government now has a page up with all you need to know about investing in shares. There is not a lot on the page, and certainly not investment advice. It even avoids answering its own question of “How many New Zealanders own shares?” They do point out that Kiwisaver and term deposits as …
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Lance Wiggs 