“Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast.” A phrase originated by Peter Drucker is an absolute reality. Any company disconnecting the two are putting their success at risk. However, while many studies show there is a direct correlation between a healthy, productive culture and a company’s bottom line, the majority of companies spend little time thinking, let alone doing anything about, this topic. Even though it’s extremely important. Corporate Culture Dictates Success or failure of digital transformation. ““Leadership often underestimates the importance of culture." Yet, culture is one of the most important sources of competitiveness. Having a culture that empowers staff and gives them a sense of purpose has become crucial. Without laying a strong foundation for culture and aligning employees to a digital vision, it will be extremely difficult to make any meaningful progress on digital transformations.” Little tip: Join us September 28 for the THINK Webinar to explore your capacity for change. Register now. 8 Steps to make Data Analytics part of your bank’s core DNA. Hands-on experience helps the bank’s leadership team to begin learning what customer data can do, the resources required, the organizational implications and to establish a realistic benchmark ROI. Having a better understanding of the impact of all these elements contributes to aligning your data analytics goals the overall business goals and resources of your institution. The enormous potential of an Integrated Banking Ecosystem. “According to the McKinsey report, there are even more fundamental areas most legacy banks and credit unions must focus on:

• Building a customer-centric vision that looks at needs from the customer perspective as opposed to the perspective of the financial institution.
• Development of cross-functional teams that are not constrained by traditional product silos.
• Improving the ability to innovate at the ‘speed of digital’. This requires more than a nice mobile experience. It requires a complete rebuild from the inside-out to enable real-time changes in direction.”

Sears should be today’s Amazon. What happened? Read “The Incredible Shrinking Sears”. “Today, Sears Holdings, the publicly traded entity that is the result of the 2005 merger of Sears and Kmart, coordinated by Mr. Lampert, is on analysts’ short list of most-likely-to-go-bankrupt retailers. Over the past decade at Sears, more than $26 billion of market value has disappeared. Revenue has been halved, as has its work force, with 175,000 people losing their jobs.” AI Is inventing languages humans can’t understand. Should we stop it? “Given that our connected age has been a bit of a disappointment, given that the internet of things is mostly a joke, given that it’s no easier to get a document from your Android phone onto your LG TV than it was 10 years ago, maybe there is something to the idea of letting the AIs of our world just talk it out on our behalf. Because our corporations can’t seem to decide on anything. But these adversarial networks? They get things done.”