WSJ: “It’s called a “returnless return”—when a company tells you to just keep a product instead of returning it. Retailers save money by not having to process the return. Now a new study has found that there’s an additional reason for companies to let shoppers keep the items: It boosts customer loyalty to the brand, with customers more likely to write positive reviews, recommend the brand and repurchase an item. The study also found that how a company frames its returnless-return policy makes a difference. For instance, highlighting the benefit to the consumer or the environment, rather than the company, makes a better impression on shoppers. What’s more, suggesting that the buyer donate the unwanted item boosts a company’s appeal.”
Emily Kasriel: “We often listen because it’s expected of us. What we’re actually doing is pantomiming listening while we’re preloading our verbal gun with ammunition so we’re ready to fire with our own ideas. We treat the speaker as a resource to extract value, but just the information we think we need. We get caught in “traps” that prevent us from listening: I need to win. Many of us instinctively believe we’re right and need to prove it. We’re on the lookout for any chink in our opponent’s armor, anything that can be exploited. I am in charge. We see our role as a leader, as someone who explains, who instructs, who adds value. With this mindset, the more authority you wield, the more expertise you have, the more pressure you put on yourself to drive the conversation. I must solve and sort. Someone shares their challenges with you because they want your sage advice. Despite honorable intentions, before you’ve truly heard them and given them an opportunity to devise a solution, you deprive them of agency. I don’t have the time. When I train leaders around the world, they tell me that time limits prevent them from listening. We’re all waging a war, a campaign for completion. We don’t have time to hear all the details that someone wants to share with us…Yet cutting off conversations also prevents serious concerns and brilliant new ideas from emerging.”
Rama Bijapurkar: “India’s biggest export, it is often said, is middle management talent to large global corporations.”
WSJ: “The belief that AI can achieve comparable results to free markets, let alone surpass them, reflects a misplaced confidence in computation and a misunderstanding of the price system. The problem for the would-be AI planners is that prices don’t exist like facts about the physical world for a computer to collect and process. They arise from competitive bidding over scarce resources and are inseparable from real market exchanges. Moreover, prices aren’t fixed inputs to be assumed in advance. They are continually being discovered and formed by entrepreneurs testing ideas about future consumer wants and resource constraints…Algorithms process data from the past while economic decisions are dynamic and forward-looking.”
Rory McDonald: “If you think about all the forces out there, in some ways, they feel very new. But in other ways, they’re the usual suspects in different clothing, right? We’ve got emerging technologies—today it’s generative AI, quantum computing, personal genomics, and many others—and years back, it was the internet, and, before that, the PC. We still have consumer trends: everybody wants things better, faster, cheaper, more customized. We’ve got large, successful incumbents and venture-backed startups moving quickly all the time; we’ve got competitors who rarely stand still; we’ve got the forces of declining performance and shrinking market share, macroeconomic conditions, geopolitics, regulation. All of these factors challenge existing business models and enable the creation of new ones…Whenever there’s a new technology, a lot of companies are tempted to take the obvious first choice: Let’s use it to get better at our existing model and be better, faster, cheaper at what we already do. And we should, of course, because if we don’t, our rivals will overtake us. But we could also think about using AI to fundamentally reshape our model. And I think the real winners that emerge as AI plays out are going to be the companies that focus on new business models, new revenue streams, new products and customers. A “better, faster, cheaper” version of your existing business model is not where the long-term economic growth of this technology will come from.”
