Originally published September 10, 2018

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in two worlds.

In one world, I go to conferences. I hear about how digitization is going to change everything. Forwarders are being disrupted (and destroyed). Shipments move step by step along a blockchain absent the slightest human intervention. Traceability is perfect. AI predicts and resolves every disruption before it happens.

In the other world, I visit our customers. A Fortune 10 company can’t pay invoices without correlating three PDFs with a printed spreadsheet. A major retailer can’t agree on what constitutes a purchase order number across six divisions. A global freight forwarder emails arrival notices to their own overseas offices.

Originally published August 20, 2018

Never, ever allow your customer to be surprised.

If your project manager is going to send a revised date, give the sponsor a heads up.

If you sales team is going to a new project’s pricing, make a quick call first.

Originally published July 22, 2018

6 hard earned tips on building a B2B blockchain application.

We started developing Vault by Chain.io last December.

At the time, I may have been caught saying, “Let’s see what we can build on the blockchain. It should only take a few days.” By the time we launched in May, my illusions about what it was going to take to be on the bleeding edge were completely shattered.

Originally published June 29, 2018

This is a great marketing article on product messaging.

I think it misses one dynamic though. It misses the situation where everybody already has bought a solution. The market isn’t traditionally "hot" since it’s saturated and wins mean displacing an incumbent. You’re competing to bring a better solution. You’re back to the differentiation approach.

Do you have a gas leak?

Natural gas doesn’t smell.

Since it’s dangerous, we add a stink to it using a chemical called mercaptan. It smells like rotten eggs. We all know that smell. We’ve been trained since childhood to react to it. Rotten eggs smell = danger. Now imagine a world where we added smells to everything:

Originally published March 8, 2018

“If you don’t get a new ERP, you’re going to be left in the dust.”

“If you don’t have AI, you’ll be blind and alone in the wood

s while everyone else scores record profits.”

“All of your competitors are perfectly executing machines that will leverage the next best thing flawlessly and completely destroy your business.”

“So write us a check and we’ll make it all better.”

Originally published February 21, 2018

This week I had the opportunity to do a fun lunchtime presentation at the Air Cargo 2018 conference. I reviewed 10 buzzwords with some practical definitions and helpful non-technical explanations. Here are the slides, and thanks to everyone who attended in person.