
The Agility Blog by
GREG KIHLSTRÖM
Perspectives on Marketing Technology, AI Adoption, CX, and Digital Transformation
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The agile workforce, Part 1: How companies can thrive in the future of work
In this 3-part series, I’m going to discuss what we mean by the agile workforce, and how organizations can succeed in a world of work that incorporates hybrid teams, increased automation, and a growing independent workforce. These concepts are taken from my book, The Agile Workforce, available in print and digital versions.
Return on customer experience: how to meaningfully measure and improve CX, Part 3
In this 3-part series, I’m going to discuss what we mean by return on experience, the link between customer and employee experience, and how to operationalize great experience in a way that is repeatable and adaptive to change. In this final part of the series, I’m going to discuss how to get started with measuring and operationalizing return on experience.
Return on customer experience: how to meaningfully measure and improve CX, Part 2
In this 3-part series, I’m going to discuss what we mean by return on experience, the link between customer and employee experience, and how to operationalize great experience in a way that is repeatable and adaptive to change. In this second part of the series, I’m going to discuss how customer and employee experience are related, as well as how to measure return on experience.
Return on customer experience: how to meaningfully measure and improve CX, Part 1
In this 3-part series, I’m going to discuss what we mean by return on experience, the link between customer and employee experience, and how to operationalize great experience in a way that is repeatable and adaptive to change. These concepts are taken from my book, The Center of Experience, available in print and digital versions.
Embracing agile creativity, Part 3: how to use process to be more successful with creative projects
You can’t have a truly successful design without the full team involved, as well as stakeholders, knowing and understanding the problem, and being able to contribute in an appropriate way towards its solution. Thus, there are several components to a creative-friendly process, and I’ll briefly explore this in five parts.
Embracing agile creativity, Part 2: how process can enable greater creativity
While there are many people more expert than myself in the subject, I happen to know a little bit about ballroom dancing. Aside from a girlfriend in college strongly...encouraging... me to join her in lessons, I shot a documentary on the subject almost two decades ago. Long story, and no, you can’t watch it. That being said, much is made over the creative approach to dancing, but these performances would be nothing without the underlying process and structure.
Embracing agile creativity, Part 1
It would seem that process and creativity are at odds with one another. How, for instance, could a rigid set of rules help inspire great design, great experiences, or new approaches to challenges? In fact, the two can not only co-exist, but work together to create better results and enable teams to be more creative and productive.
Forbes: How To Create A Great Remote Employee Experience
Many workforce experts refer to a “hybrid workforce” as part of our future. This is made up of several types of workers, including independent consultants, full-time employees and it also incorporates both on-site and remote workers.
That uncomfortable feeling is here to stay
We are collectively living through a period of change. We can call it mid-pandemic, post-COVID, next normal, or whatever we like, but it’s here. Home is on the other side of over a year of something unexpectedly and suddenly different. A new time has arrived, and we are different people, for better or worse. We are in that time and we aren’t leaving. We aren’t going back home, because we aren’t changing back.
Instead of a "good" experience, start creating delight
There are a plethora of materials already on the subject of the value of customer and employee experience. In my work, I’ve helped clients with customer experience, employee experience, even student experience. This work is a natural outcome of several other disciplines.
12 customer experience keynote speakers you should consider
I’m often asked for recommendations for great keynote speakers that can talk on the topic of customer experience, and I’m grateful to know quite a few of them personally! Here is a list of a dozen customer experience keynote speakers you should know about.
Hiring Successfully in the era of the agile workforce
We’re living in the age of the agile workforce, with hybrid teams of full-time, onsite, remote, and freelance workers collaborating to create great results. In order to achieve the most success possible, companies need to innovate in their hiring practices and shift their thinking in some cases.
Starting the Conversation About the Agile Workforce
We are now at a point in history where many tasks and repeatable processes can be done better by machines than humans. While this has been true in some industries for decades (think car manufacturing), it will soon be true across the board in every industry imaginable.
While many see this as a doomsday prophecy, I see it as an opportunity for humanity to transcend the grunt work and tasks that many have found themselves doing to make ends meet, and to instead gain an agency and freedom over how they earn their living.
Forbes: Upskilling Creates an Agile Workforce
To meet the demands that the future of work will bring, we need to develop an agile workforce. This means that professionals will need to adapt and change with the growing and shifting needs of businesses that are being faced with continual pressure to increase profits. This needs to happen while also shifting to automation, more data-driven approaches and competitive pressure to innovate.
M&A Unplugged: Growing A Business Through Acquisition And Selling It Higher with Greg Kihlstrom
A business has its cycle. Many successful entrepreneurs know that, in one way or another, you will have to find your exit—one that leaves you far better than when you started. In this episode, Domenic Rinaldi invites serial entrepreneur Greg Kihlstrom, to talk about Greg’s experience growing a business through acquisition and then selling that same business years later for a much higher multiple.
Forbes: How Hybrid Teams Are Critical To Growth
The workforce is in a continual shift as markets change, companies grow and refocus, and external factors shape how, when and even where we work. Because of these considerations, and countless others, companies need to be agile in their approach to the composition of their workforce. Hybrid workforces build on this idea, by creating teams that are a mixture of full-time, long-term employees and short-term contract and freelance workers.
Recruiter.com: It’s Time to Rethink the Resume. There Are Much Better Ways to Evaluate Candidates.
It almost goes without saying: When you are reviewing candidates, you want to see their resumes. The resume is probably the most consistent component in the recruiting process, the only truly universal ingredient across companies and roles of all kinds.
Yet despite its ubiquity, the resume is a deeply flawed method of evaluating candidates. At best, it is only a very small piece of the puzzle when it comes to making the right hiring decision.
6 digital transformation keynote speakers you should consider
Digital transformation is such a pervasive subject at organizations these days. I am often approached for recommendations of keynote speakers on the topic, and thought I’d provide half a dozen recommendations for those considering a speaker.
Forbes: Improving The Freelancer Experience To Increase Productivity
The freelance economy is currently contributing $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy, growing 22% since 2019. This rapid growth was already developing before Covid-19 became widespread, though the global pandemic and the remote working, layoffs, furloughs and other byproducts of this massive shift in the workforce will undoubtedly continue to increase.
Forbes: The Agile Workforce
We’ve all been affected by the “gig economy” one way or another. This might be through the way we travel (Uber or Lyft), buy our groceries (Instacart) or hire any number of other services. Or, for an increasing number of workers in the United States and around the world, the gig economy may contribute to some or all of their income.
The “gig economy” started to be called by that name as early as 2009 by Tina Brown of The Daily Beast. It was meant to describe the idea that fewer people were taking full-time jobs, and more were taking short-term, task-related “gigs” and making a living from them.