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When it comes to market segmentation, I dont see truly well-documented cases often. At a more simplistic level, we think of classic matrices such as BCG or McKinseys. But the real exercise of segmentation is far more complex. In certain contexts, it comes close to the behavior of a tensor: multiple dimensions, cross-dependencies, distinct weights, temporality, and contextual factors that shift the meaning of data depending on the axis being analyzed. Thinking like a tensor is practicing Model Thinking, which remains, above all, an analog discipline. It requires a brain, not a machine. The challenge is necessarily multidisciplinary, and this is exactly where executives suffer, spending enormous time compensating for immature teams. Even when business operators manage to bring quantitative data from ERP, CRM, or sector reports (which are often scarce or methodologically fragile), the information set must be normalized. This process demands an additional set of competencies: statistical knowledge, data-cleaning techniques, sampling concepts, dimensional modeling, and even systems logic to avoid collinearity and redundancy. When unstructured data is added, the challenge grows further. This includes everything from more sophisticated sentiment analysis to qualitative inputs from field teams, customer recordings, or information mined from third-party sources. In these cases, the problem is not confined to normalization: It involves interpreting, validating, reducing noise, and converting natural language into structures that can interface with transactional data. It is epistemological, not just technical. SERIOUS SEGMENTATION Serious segmentation is not a mere snapshot of the market. It plots and overlays multiple layers: data on strategic human resources (both internal and competitive), asset acquisition history, technological maturity, revenues and margins, pricing elasticity, media activity, public opinion, and ecosystem maps revealing the true position of players. Good segmentation uncovers unclaimed revenue, positioning errors, pricing failures, ignored clusters, asymmetries between capability and discourse, and even subtle competitor movements that go unnoticed at the tactical level. The entire process demands other equally essential competencies: dataset modeling, command of relational tables, use of manipulation languages such as SQL, Python, or R, basic and applied statistics, visualization techniques, clustering, similarity analysis, and, above all, the ability to formulate hypotheses. Without hypotheses, there is no segmentation. There is only table sorting. THE AGENT ERA In the so-called era of agents (some already speak of the decade of agents) a complementary arsenal emerges to support these processes. Agents capable of cleaning and normalizing data, agents for web scraping and data enrichment, agents that classify and label content using LLMs as annotators, statistical automation agents able to perform clustering, PCA, or churn analysis, reconciliation agents capable of resolving deduplication and probabilistic matching, and competitive-simulation agents designed to test elasticity scenarios, pricing movements, or anticipated reactions of market players. As a last resort, and not as the first option, as leaders outside tech hubs tend to believe, RAG enters the picture. This article could list agents available in the ecosystem for immediate use, but it is fundamentally about the capabilities that precede automation. Before any automation, there is foundational knowledge: truly understanding the discipline of segmentation, knowing principles of market behavior, and having clarity about the information models that generate strategic insights for guiding portfolio, productive capacity, and competitive advantage. No GPU, no matter how powerful, replaces this conceptual clarity. And this clarity is not necessarily the exclusive responsibility of IT, the CTO, or marketing teams (understanding marketing here, according to the American Marketing Associations definition). Segmentation belongs to multidimensional leaders capable of moving fluidly across strategy, operations, data, behavior, and finance. The provocative question remains: Do these leaders exist in the analog perspective, prior to automation? Many companies try to leap directly from subjective culture to algorithmic culture without building the intermediate methodological culture, and this is one of the silent sources of failure today. There is robust literature on segmentation and, it must be said, it requires intellectual musculature. I appreciate Malcolm McDonald and Ian Dunbar in Market Segmentation. Peter Fader, from the Wharton School, offers a more financial and pricing-oriented view in The Customer-Base Audit. Naturally, these two works only give a glimpse of the thinking underlying the structured idea. FINAL THOUGHTS Finally, two observations. First, what I have just written is not something that ChatGPTeven as a generative modelwould spontaneously produce. LLMs do not naturally form implicit assumptions across domains, nor do they articulate disciplinary layers whose connection depends on human repertoire and has not been previously mapped. They operate on existing corpora; they do not originate new paradigms on their own. Second, most business schools today, aside from a small group of highly specialized institutions, tend not to emphasize this mode of thinking. Not by fault, but by design. Their structure was built to serve the needs of upward-moving managers, not to cultivate the broader, integrative perspective required of executive-level decision makers. This gap in knowledge for top leadership has a structural explanation: The audience is relatively small, and therefore not the core economic engine of educational institutions. As a result, many executive leaders find themselves without ongoing renewal of their knowledge matrix, even in an era that promotes continuous learning. A paradox of our time. Rodrigo Magnago is researcher and director at RMagnago Critical Thinking.
Category:
E-Commerce
A recent New York Times headlineDid Women Ruin the Workplace?sparked a firestorm across social media. Alison Moore, CEO of Chief, the prestigious network for senior women executives, is pushing back on this notion with data and nuance. Drawing from an exclusive nationwide survey of women leaders, Moore unpacks how evolving career paths are being misread, the impact of market disruption, and why women-centered spaces remain vital. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. The environment that you’ve come into with the Trump White House is kind of heightened; discussions about diversity are heated. The term DEI has become kind of a negative. How do you frame what Chief is about in this kind of climate? There’s certainly more scrutiny on things today perhaps than there were in the past, but I think at the end of the day, there’s a desire for creating better, stronger leaders, better outcomes, better decision-making, more agile thinking. While there are different contexts being held and conversations being held around DEI and the nuances of that, the truth is when you cut through the big headlines, the realities remain the same, which is supporting leadership at a time of high velocity of change is always beneficial, and we happen to build that in a way that supports women leaders, and I think there’s a lot of support for that. Chief recently published a report in partnership with Harris surveying over a thousand senior level women, and it pointed to a sort of changing definition of maybe ambition and success, a shift away from playing it safe toward bolder career moves, which was in some ways more optimistic and more empowering than I’d expected. There had been a slew of articles that had come out focusing on changes in the workforce and finding the negative nugget in there to kind of put that on blast. And I’m not denying that there aren’t those factors at hand, but the she-cession is coming, women are being dumped out of the workforce. The return to office doesn’t work for all women in the polarity that we’re in today of big headlines being the only definition. We lose all nuance. And so for us here, I come in February and I’m looking at this incredibly energetic Chief membership and thinking, “This is what I’m seeing. I’m seeing people reacting and responding to change in ways that are innovative and curious and thought-provoking, this level of optimism that’s sitting in Chief, that they’re communicating together.” This is not just Chief telling women to be optimistic, this is the energy that you’re feeling from conversation. And so the genesis of this poll was how do we validate that? And so in the women that we surveyed, they’re citing that they’re more ambitious now than ever, and in fact they’re energized by the professional growth ahead because they feel like they can have more optionality and more of a hand on the wheel of their own career design than what they used to have. This is where that metaphor of the ladder and the stay rung to rung to rung and keep the course and stay the path and then something happens at the top. Everyone can see that’s not necessarily the case anymore. How much of the boldness do you think might be economy driven? I noticed that over 80% of the executives cited market disruption as a motivator. It’s almost like disruption is, I don’t know, forcing action? I think the economy is certainly always going to be a factor, but it’s also like, look at industry consolidation. You can look at what’s happening in the media business, you can look at what’s happening across retail. You can look at what’s happening in every vector and AI, which has a through line all the way across all of these industries, and a common thread of this duality of opportunity and threat of change. Is that rung as a metaphor again, for just career direction, not necessarily the corporate ladder as much as it is just the up a ladder? Is that the right path for me? Do I want other options? Do I want different kinds of flexibility? Do I have the sort of tools at my fingertips to actually do that? And that is what happens at Chief and that’s what’s been very interesting for me to see and come back actually from a founding membership in 2019 to where we are today. Women are building, scheming, meaning business is scheming, partnering, collaborating differently now. I think the lids off on a lot of that stuff for women. And so you do feel the optimism coming out in this survey, even though I think there’s a pragmatism and recognizing it is coming from disruption, but disruption does bring opportunity. So much of Chief is built around in-person connection and community, but in-person it’s so hard to scale. And I know when I was talking to your predecessor, Carolyn, she talked about the potential to have a LinkedIn-like product and a Masterclass-like product and a dating-app like product. How do you think about todays digital tools for community versus the IRL experiences? Where do you balance those things? What I think about Chief today, and I think that was a very accurate description that Carolyn gave when that started. I think we’ve morphed into this space where there are a couple of different components. There are intimate experiences. By that, I mean small space experiences where you talk and see and share about leadership challenges that can be in a virtual experience, very rewarding, but in certain places and markets, we can make that happen in real life. It doesn’t have to be either-or, coaching, one-to-one coaching, so that happens on a virtual piece sometimes, that can be very rewarding, but if I’m going to have a cocktail party around other senior marketers, that should be at the clubhouse in real life. I’m about to go to LA this week for my eighth and then San Francisco in two weeks for the ninth. Nine ChiefXs this year, and this is where nine locations across the country, we’ve had members come, and it’s in real life, and they’re like rallies, and I get so much energy out of these things. It’s unbelievable. We have some speakers, some programming, but it’s really about this kind of connecting energy between Chiefs with other Chiefs, big corporate people talking to founders of small things, folks who are in transition, all senior leaders in various parts of their journey, and these large rallies are definitely IRL and then peppered between that are the right size virtual experiences. My next tranche of focus is really on the digital experience, the Chief app, the Chief digital experience in terms of, how do we make that as bes of a member companion? The networking piece, the connections piece, whether that was the LinkedIn analogy that Carolyn meant, that’s where that really comes to life, but it comes to life in service of a lot of in real life experiences across multiple use types. Many of the things that a woman leader is interested in are things that any leader is interested in. It doesn’t have to connect to the fact that it’s a woman, and then there are a tranche of things that may be more applicable to women than to men, although you could argue they’re applicable to everyone. I always struggled with this when we mentioned you being in Fast Company. It was for a package we did on the most creative people in business and there were men and women on it, and we didn’t do a most powerful women in business like Fortune did. But there is something different when women get together without men there that maybe as a man I don’t quite appreciate or I want to, but I don’t really know. Listen, I think for women in leadership roles, there is a place and a time for being together and learning from each other that’s just different. It’s additive. The conversations are because a woman’s career journey is tied to that 360 view of who they are in life, it just makes those conversations different, but not necessarily better. I’ve been in multiple coworking environments where it’s male, female, that’s all great too. I’m a big believer in the bothI really am.
Category:
E-Commerce
Its the first week in December. If you don’t already have the Christmas tunes blasting in the office, what are you waiting for? The debate over listening to music while at work, however, often divides offices. Some love to crank up the music while toiling away, and find silence to be deafening. Others can only listen to background music or instrumental playlists like coffeeshop jazz in the background or LoFi Girl, a genre featuring low-fidelity, calming beats. Some insist on complete silence. As the countdown to the holidays begins, Google searches for Christmas playlist 2025 have spiked this past week. But could listening to Mariah Carey or Michael Bublé on loop be sabotaging office productivity? A study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that pleasurable music triggers dopamine release, creating a natural high that can boost energy for mundane tasks. But while listening to music can boost focus and productivity, the BPM, or beats per minute, matter: Research has shown music with a tempo of 50-80 beats per minute is optimal for focus and productivity. When background music at a workplace is out of sync with what workers need to get on with their jobs, it can affect their energy, mood and even performance. So what does this mean for your favorite festive tunes? TopResume analyzed Spotifys most popular Christmas songs and ranked them by BPM to reveal the tracks most likely to derail office concentration in the final weeks of 2025. Bad news for Ariana Grande stans. Grandes Last Christmas takes the top spot as the most distracting Christmas song, with a 206 BPM. This comes in at over triple the recommended BPM of 60-80 for maintaining focus during tasks. Employees may also find Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters’ “Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas)” and Shakin’ Stevens’ “Merry Christmas Everyone” somewhat distracting with a 203 BPM. Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (202 BPM), another Ariana Grande Christmas classic, “Santa Tell Me” (192 BPM) are also best left for lunch break listening. On the other hand, Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” emerged as the most productivity-friendly holiday track, clocking in at just 67 BPM, the optimal tempo range for maintaining concentration. Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas To You)” and Whitney Houston’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?” tied at 73 BPM. The Vince Guaraldi Trio’s beloved “Christmas Time Is Here” comes in at 75 BPM. Festive favorite Ella Fitzgerald claims two spots with “Frosty The Snowman” and “Sleigh Ride,” both at 77 BPM. The end of the year is an especially demanding time for many professionals. Between wrapping up projects, juggling tighter deadlines, managing holiday commitments at home, and navigating the colder weather and shorter days, its easy for stress levels to creep up, Amanda Augustine, a certified professional career coach and the resident career expert for TopResume, says. Thats why its so important to create a festive atmosphere at work that doesnt sacrifice anyones focus. p>Thats not an excuse to be a Grinch and insist on silence (after all, its Christmas and noise cancelling headphones exist for a reason). Simply swap out Ariana Grande for Ella Fitzgerald in shared spaces and everyones happy. Maybe.
Category:
E-Commerce
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