Blog & Articles
Robert has published more than 150 columns, articles, white papers, and research studies on relationship. In addition to being a regular contributor at Huffington Post, his work has been published and discussed in Forbes, American Banker, Sales & Marketing Management magazine, The CEO Magazine, ABA Bank Marketing magazine, Computerworld, The Daily Beast, Business Week, The Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, The Detroit News, The Indianapolis Star and in international publications including Sydney Morning News (Australia), European Financial Management Association (London) and Relational Thinking Network (Cambridge, UK).
They’ll cut more than 101,000 jobs this year. – Businessweek’s projection of 2011 job cuts by the top 50 banks
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As we finalize our plans and budgets for 2012, one thing is clear: most businesses have lost the ability to grow and the national government has lost the ability to shrink. The talk of reduced government spending goes on endlessly while the U.S. deficit continues to spiral upward. In the private sector everyone talks about the imperative for revenue growth but […]
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… a growing catalog of studies that pin the blame for an appalling share of preventable deaths on poor communication among doctors, patients and nurses. – The New York Times, July 11, 2011
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This summer the National Football League reached a ten-year agreement with the players union, and both sides seem to feel pretty good about the deal and about each other. The federal debt-ceiling and deficit reduction fiasco in Washington was pretty much disliked by all sides including the public, […]
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Don’t believe everything you think. – Thomas Kida
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It happens over and again. Conventional wisdom that is heavy on convention and light on wisdom. One of the latest conventions to bite the dust is the crime rate. The learned class has assumed that difficult economic times lead to higher crime rates. So when the FBI announced that violent crime in the U.S. had reached a 40-year low in 2010, many criminologists were dumbfounded. Noted scholar James Q. Wilson reports in The […]
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In 2000, it started with 374 listings … By 2008, that number jumped to 2,218 and nearly doubled to 4,100 as of today. — ‘Local Harvest’s’ listings of Community Supported Agriculture groups that provide local fruit and vegetables
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It is just about impossible to ignore this new, upgraded version of “local.” Hyperlocal even has its own Wikipedia page. My first book The Streetcorner Strategy for Winning Local Markets extolled the virtue of local but that was before the internet, was ubiquitous or Google, […]
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May you live in interesting times. May you come to the attention of those in authority. May you find what you are looking for.- According to Chinese legend, three ancient curses of increasing severity.
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Oh, the curse of living in interesting times. Business in general is challenging these days and the questions about marketing strategies and budgets are particularly tricky. In the banking industry a number of organizations have gotten adverse publicity for spending marketing dollars on high profile ads, […]
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Logic can convince but only emotion can motivate. – Jonathan Alter
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Our love affair with information is killing our relationships. Over the past two decades the implicit assumption has been that more information would strengthen our relationships. The reality is that our methods for collecting and using information are stifling the formation and development of our connections with employees and customers. Our quest for copious, efficient, low-cost and ever-accessible information is getting very expensive. It is time for Chief Marketing Officers […]
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” … the United States is now the most anxious nation in the world.” – National Institute of Mental Health
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We have truly become the nation of “high anxiety.” It seems that as the wealthiest, most stable nation in the world we have really been on a stress binge over the past few decades. Surely the calamity of the recent economy – unemployment, housing collapse, epic decline of 401Ks, and government budget crises – have not helped. Yet we started down […]
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“It is not slickness, polish, uniqueness, or cleverness that makes a brand. It is truth.” – Harry Beckwith
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The pressure for banks to grow retail and small business revenue is a real challenge. We face changing regulations that lower fees, customers who visit our branches less and less and a marketplace hardened against sales tactics that push products now and seek relationships later (maybe). The truth is that many of our sales culture initiatives have strained the relationships with our customers […]
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Here is a one-question quiz: What company in 2010 created the largest lead over its competition in customer satisfaction? A hint, its retail stores played a very key role. The answer, which we will get to shortly, is highly relevant to a banking industry facing daunting challenges from three on-going trends.
First we continue to see our customers less. American Banker reports that in the first six months of 2007 compared to the first six months of 2010, the average per-branch […]
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Any problem that money will solve is not a very big problem. – A wise saying from my sister.
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I don’t know if you have noticed it or not but money has had a really bad year. Conventional wisdom has been that money could buy almost anything we want or need. Yet just when we seem to have become convinced of that as a society, it lets us down. Now who would have thought that in the midst of all the […]
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