This week I was lucky to spend some time at UTD with students that are just starting to make those important and sometimes scary decisions that will set them off on the journey that will define the rest of their lives.

I also saw a presentation this week at the excellent DisruptHR event in Dallas about how important it is to engage our kids now and give them as many opportunities as we can to help lead them into the future and get them started off right. It is something we cant just expect to take care of itself, we have to put effort in. In fact the more effort we put in the better the return. kids are the future and we are a key to their success.

I was honored to be a part of developing the intern program at Quisitive, a small consulting firm with big customers and big challenges to solve. We focused on building a program that would help us tap into the next generation of workers, and also help them get started on their journey.

I sat down with one of the recent interns from that program, Weldon Boley, a recent graduate of TCU. Go frogs!

He recently wrote a blog about the last year of his college journey, what he learned in his internship experience and what the first sixty days of his new career has taught him. I highly recommend you read his blog, I will put a link to it in the show notes.

To cover the other side of the long journey called a career, from Quisitive today, the Chief Experience Officer Paul Bresnahan brings his journey with Fujitsu and making his first career decisions to the conversation.

SHOW NOTES:

Weldon Boley's Blog

Paul Bresnahan

DisruptHR

Jason Grochowski Client Strategy Principle and I talk about the Digital Customer Experience in the modern age. We even take a stab at a look back on customer experience over the last 100 years. Mass Production turned to Mass Marketing. The online customer experience was born and the psychology of marketing continues to get more complicated.

How to business are taking the traditional offline customer experience to an online personalized experience - from "Click to Brick".

We talk Beats by Dre, Defiant Ones on HBO and how documentaries like Making a Murderer, and O.J. Made in America have change how we look at documentaries.

We talk about how Dyson has changed their company and a utilitarian boring product like a vacuum cleaner and reinvented and gave it cache. 

The former Chief Digital Officer of Pizza Hut, Baron Concors, talks Digital Transformation and Innovation at Pizza Hut and his inspiring the love of technology in kids through robots at his new venture Techie Factory.

We dive into his early years and his first experiences with technology that started him on his journey through high end consulting firms Ernst & Young and Deloitte Consulting, to leadership roles at FedEx and into the c-suite at Pizza Hut and Yum! Restaurants International.

For many years companies have been keenly focused on driving revenue and continually improving their established value streams to stay relevant. Companies used to be around for decades with little impact from technology and a steep ramp up cycle that protected them from competitors. Over the last few years the rapid advancement of technology has turned everything on its head. Companies can become irrelevant over night and startups pop up every day that challenge companies that are still moving slow and are held back by old tech and old strategies. This new digital world is creating disruption through out industries everyday.

So, what does Digital Transformation mean? A quick search on Google will return plenty of articles containing the terms digital transformation or some version of it. But, are we all defining it the same way? I have found that while the term is quite popular and companies have even allocated resources to transformation or disruption, each company I talk to has a different definition of what they mean and often within the same company or team there is disagreement.

Is it digital transformation a strategy? Is it only relevant to startups? Does it apply to an industry or a vertical? Is it a new name for enterprise improvement? Is it about enabling innovation? Is it adopting new technology? Is it all these things?

But, are these the questions we should be asking? Are we asking the right questions? Would it be more accurate to ask if digital transformation is real? Or is this just semantics at this point?

I sit down with Strategy and Innovation Director William Oellerman and talk about what Digital Transformation means and how that applies to so many things around us.

SHOW NOTES

Follow William on LinkedIn

Williams Blog

BEING DIGITAL by Nicholas Negroponte

We go full Wu Tang and talk digital entitlement and Game of Throne rom coms with the Shon Rathbone the founder of Dallas based creative agency 3 Headed Monster. We break the first rule of Fight Club and we talk about our experience attending Digital Fight Club this past week. Then we wrap up with some "instant millionaire" insight in my 1 on 1 with Dallas Maverick's owner and billionaire Mark Cuban.

This weeks episode is brought to you by Crowd Activator, the new product that you sprinkle into your boring presentations when you want to add some pop culture references to get the crowd going and keep them interested. Need to add Game of Thrones references to your data presentation, how about some PUBG references to build credibility in your ROI workshop... then you need Crowd Activator.

Teaser for episode 102 out on 8/28 featuring my interview with Shon Rathbone, my 1 on 1 with Mark Cuban and Scott and I break down our time at Digital Fight Club this week.

On this episode we dive head first into deciphering Digital Disruption and what it means. What does digital mean in general and what is Digital DNA? And, finally we stumple into Digital Entitlement and our baseline expectations of digital experiences everywhere. Are companies like Amazon making brick and mortar obsolete or are they forcing companies to change and mordernize? Can big box stores still be relevant? Is it technology, is it timing, is it using the data we already have? What is it?