White House Turns to Corporate America to Fix Testing Shortfall

The Trump administration is leaning heavily on the nation’s drug retailers and lab-testing companies to try to solve a problem that has vexed it since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic: Getting mass testing up and running smoothly. Expanding on an earlier effort to ramp up testing in store parking lots, the White House on Monday revealed plans to partner with Walmart Inc., CVS Health Corp., Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and other chain retailers and diagnostics companies to...

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How to Give a Rockstar Product Presentation

Focus on story structure, engagement tactics, and fast-paced experimentation to give high Net Promoter Score presentations your audience will love.

  Here’s a quick 30-minute webinar video I created for product people who want to deliver great product presentations. Here’s the outline: Click here to watch the video and to download a PDF of the presentation....

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Navigating the Cultural Minefield of E-Mail Salutations

  Most of us work within a shared business culture where we understand the language cues. Those of us who work across cultures, however, experience the minefield of communicating with people in other countries using our own cultural shorthand. Surprisingly, this applies even to the simple act of signing off an e-mail. A recent article in BBC News discussed the perils of signing an e-mail "regards" or "sincerely" when sending it to an acquaintance in another country. An American would find...

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How to create connections at work in the age of isolation

  If you are feeling isolated at work, even in the midst of a busy office, you are not alone. A recent survey of more than 2,000 managers and employees found that employees depend on technology to communicate with their colleagues. The methods are led by e-mail (45 percent) and followed by text messaging (15 percent) and instant messaging (12 percent). Of those who cited e-mail, more than 40 percent said "they felt lonely always or often, were not engaged and had a high need...

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Most Amazon Brands Are Duds Not Disrupters Study Finds

  The explosion of Amazon.com's private-label products has prompted concern that Amazon could use its clout to promote these house brands at the expense of merchants selling similar products on the web store. But the fears may be overblown, according to a new study released by Marketplace Pulse. In the study, the research firm examined 23,000 products and the consumer behavior associated with those products. They found that shoppers "aren’t more inclined to buy Amazon brands...

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US Startups Optimistic Business Conditions will Improve

  In its recently released Startup Outlook Report, Silicon Valley Bank shared the results of its survey of 1,400 founders and executives of global startups. The survey found these entrepreneurs upbeat about their business prospects. "The 2019 report series finds that despite economic and political uncertainty across the globe, startups are generally optimistic about their business opportunities, and they plan to raise capital and expand their workforces this year," concluded the report authors. Among the survey respondents were over...

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Daimler and BMW bet on Ride-Sharing Services as the Future

  Daimler AG and BMW AG have forged an agreement into which they will pour more than 1 billion euros ($1.13 billion) into a car-sharing and ride-hailing businesses. They plan to take on established players like Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc.

Is Ride-Sharing the Future for the Auto Industry?

The new venture was first announced almost one year ago. It will combine Daimler’s Car2go and BMW’s DriveNow to create the world’s biggest car-sharing operator by users, according to BloombergNEF....

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Who Are the World’s Most Innovative Countries?

  Bloomberg has released its seventh annual Innovation Index. It ranks 200 countries by analyzing a range of criteria using metrics like research and development spending, education scores, manufacturing capability and concentration of high-tech public companies. "South Korea retained the global crown in the 2019 Bloomberg Innovation Index, though improvements by Germany in research and education brought Europe’s largest economy to near-parity in the annual ranking," Bloomberg wrote in a recent release. "The U.S. moved up to eighth place, a...

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Ten design practices to deliver business value

  For those companies that get design right, the prizes are rich. The S&P 500 companies that invested most into design processes, capabilities, and leadership over the past decade, including design stalwarts such as Disney, Nike, and P&G, outperformed the rest of the index by 211 percent.

Design Thinking Approaches 50. Yet it is still Misunderstood.

McKinsey published a recent brief on design thinking as it nears its 50th birthday. It found that many companies still struggle to realize value from design. "While...

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Portrait by AI Program Sells for $432,000 at Auction

  An artwork created by an artificially intelligent (AI) program has been sold at auction through Christie's in New York for $432,000, about 43 times the initial estimate of up to $10,000 by the auction house. The portrait is the first piece of AI art to go under the hammer at a major auction house. The sale attracted a significant amount of media attention, according to a recent article in BBC News. "AI is just one of several technologies...

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