I was recently traveling from Houston, TX, back to Oklahoma City, and as usual, I was flying Southwest. If you have ever flown SW, you know the drill: Line up according to your boarding number, A1-A60 first. My boarding position this trip was A31, so I was at the very front of the second line. […]
Category Archives: Leadership
Innovation? That’s Someone Else’s Job…
I recently read an article posted on PYMNTS.com about innovation that caught my attention. The article was an excerpt of a new study conducted by PYMNTS.com about financial institutions’ readiness for innovation. You can read the article here. Some 200 bank executives were interviewed. Here are a couple of stats from the article: 78% of […]
Remediating a Problem or Crisis, it’s Really Simple
Every July, I get the honor to teach at the Graduate School of Banking held at the University of Colorado in Boulder. If you are in financial services and want to position yourself as a future CSuite executive, this is the school you should attend. Check it out here. During my technology class in a […]
The Consequences of Not Planning Ahead
My wife Samantha and I love the sea. We try to boat, sail, or generally get into the salt water as much as we can. We recently had an opportunity to spend a week on the island of Antigua (we were scouting for a 2020 sailing trip) and we did a lot of snorkeling. We […]
Uber customer service exceeds expectations
In most situations, I use Uber instead of a cab. It’s just more convenient, and the mobile app makes communication for where and when I can get picked up vastly superior to any taxi option I know of. (By the way, do you think if taxi companies had started developing mobile apps 10 years ago, […]
Don’t Inadvertently Limit Innovation
I asked 16 payments executives to draw a vase. Let me explain… I have been facilitating strategic planning for 20 years for one organization, PaymentsFirst. P1st is a nonprofit payments association headquartered in Atlanta, and serves financial institutions and corporations in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Their executives are some of the most well-respected […]
Being Strategic by Improving the Customer Experience
The issue of how you can improve the customer experience cannot be adequately covered in a few hundred words. Let me give two examples, one dealing with the digital / online experience and one dealing with the physical branch. If you are like most FIs, you have multiple online banking systems. Typically, you would have […]
Being Strategic by Reducing Operating Costs
What are the activities that a typical business customer of yours engages in that mostly manually and cost-intensive? Don’t know? It’s likely that, as bankers, we don’t spend much time thinking about the internal cost of our business customers. But there are areas in which an FI has a direct opportunity to reduce costs for […]
“What are you doing” – A Continued View on Perspective
It may be a coincidence, but I seem to be on a bit of a perspective kick. While in church on Mother’s Day Sunday, our associate pastor told a story about Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. One day, as Christopher was making his rounds examining the work he had laid […]
Bringing Innovation into the Bathroom
I’ve written about lights in parking garages that indicate an available parking space before. This visual indicator is so handy, and I’m happy the parking garage at the OKC airport has installed these lights. So you can imagine my delight when I walked into the restroom at the Atlanta airport and saw the following: Lights […]