Better business, built from the inside out.

How Do We Preserve the Human Story While Proving Impact? Human stories can make impact visible in ways numbers alone cannot. The challenge is preserving what makes those stories human while still showing what changed. Some of the strongest evidence of impact comes from the people who experienced it firsthand. A set of numbers can show how many people were reached or whether an outcome improved, but a human story can explain what that change actually meant in someone’s life. It adds context,...

What Can Caribbean Businesses Do Better With AI? Caribbean Businesses Are Using AI. The Bigger Question Is What It’s Changing. PwC’s 2024 Caribbean Digital Readiness Survey was based on a relatively small sample of 76 senior executives across several Caribbean markets. Even so, 45% of participating executives identified artificial intelligence as the technology most critical to their company’s strategy. Yet 55% said their organizations were still not fully using data tools across operational...

Don’t Let the Speaker Bio Lose the Plot Too many introductions prove that a speaker is accomplished without making clear why this person belongs in the conversation. It is hardly unusual for a guest speaker’s bio to be shared with the audience before they make their presentation. Unfortunately, it seems far less automatic to ensure that the introduction establishes a clear sense of why the speaker belongs in the room to begin with. There is a particular kind of speaker introduction that has...

Questions I Keep Coming Back To This is an Inspired Chief conversation series built around questions that keep resurfacing in different forms: how we lead, exercise judgment, build trust, navigate ambition, respond to change and decide what we want to carry forward. Each conversation approaches those questions through a different person’s experience, work and perspective. The aim is to surface ideas worth carrying into your own choices, whether you are early in your career, leading a team,...

Is the Business Finished, or Just This Version of It? Before you close it, cut it or keep investing in it, take one clear-eyed look at what still works, what has changed and what may be worth carrying forward. When the question changes There comes a point when “How do we grow this?” is no longer the most insightful question for a business struggling through successive periods of decline or failing to scale. Sometimes you can see that point coming. Sometimes you realize you crossed it three...

When the Store Disappears, What Builds the Brand? As customer journeys fragment across platforms and channels, the brand has to work harder to stay whole. As businesses chase efficiency, convenience and scale, more of the customer experience is moving beyond the physical business itself. On paper, the logic is hard to argue with: fewer steps, faster transactions, more self-service, more delivery, lower operating costs and greater reach. But efficiency has a habit of moving work around, not...

When Your Value and Your Visibility Don’t Match What Being Underestimated As a Leader Is Actually Telling You Resilience: rĭ-zĭl′yəns (noun) The power or ability to recover quickly from a setback, depression, illness, overwork, or other adversity; buoyancy; elasticity —of people. Fair warning: this article asks a lot of questions. That’s partly because “just be more visible” turns out to be a surprisingly incomplete answer. It has been years since we transitioned to a corporate paradigm that...

Your Customer Shouldn't Need to Become an Expert to Buy From You Retailers have spent years making more information available. The next advantage may be helping customers do less interpretation. While working on a project to improve the customer experience in a highly specialized retail garment category, I became interested in a deceptively simple question: How easy is it for the customer to actually make a decision? Purchase journeys are rarely linear. Consumers search, compare, read...

We Want AI to Find Us. We Just Don't Want it to Eat Us. How much access to our thinking are we willing to exchange for discoverability? For anyone publishing on the open web, AI discoverability is becoming inseparable from content strategy. Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is where a growing share of discovery happens, and showing up in AI-generated answers and recommendations isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's the job. The Old Bargain Is Breaking The old digital bargain was simple enough:...