Jeffrey Rayport Speaking Topics

• Discussion Leadership and Facilitation

  Many senior leadership teams find themselves wanting productive leadership and facilitation when addressing current strategies or developing new ones. Others want to develop themselves or their direct reports through case study-style discussions. These sessions may have an agenda, goals, and objectives set in advance, but the ultimate outcome is, in effect, “co-created” by executives in highly interactive sessions with one another. As the founder of multiple custom corporate universities, and a three time winner of Harvard Business School’s Best Professor award, Rayport is uniquely qualified and highly experienced in leading high-impact interactive strategic planning sessions and corporate retreats

• The Future of Service

  From digital kiosks to pop-up stores and websites to mobile sites, the automation of services has arrived. Economists long prophesized that this could never occur. Why? Because the “human factor dependency”—employees interacting with customers on the front line—was supposed to make it impossible to drive the kind of productivity gains through automation that transformed agriculture 200 years ago, manufacturing 100 years ago, and data processing 50 years ago. It is the job of every corporate leader to understand this sea-change in the delivery of services and envision how they will compete in a future governed by the intelligent division of labor between people and machines.

Six Essential Principles of Customer Engagement

Nothing is more critical to business than customer engagement. In an economy with too much of everything—in which products, services, and brands become commodities overnight—engagement is the key to unlocking demand. It’s how brands compete for the time, attention, and purchasing power of customers. Engagement has radically changed as a result of the digital world. Now, companies must find ways to exploit network effects, form factors, integration of multiple channels, laser sharp (vertical) customer focus, and spark social interaction and networking. Understanding the new rules of engagement will help executives and managers alike build more compelling brands.

Make Your Products Ambassadors for Your Brand

There is no such thing as Caveat Emptor in today’s contested markets. Marketing communications only goes so far. Now, products must deliver distinctive branded experiences and services must find ways to “live the brand.” BMW doesn’t just talk about the “ultimate driving machine”; it delivers the message experientially in every car it sells. Likewise, OXO doesn’t spend a great deal of money promoting Good Grips kitchen implements; the culinary products deliver the message and the brand themselves. Many paradigmatic examples are Web companies: Google has built a Top 3 global brand with no marketing. Simply put, no one can afford to sell products or services resulting in buyer’s remorse. Markets are too contested for companies to ignore advertise brands in ways that don’t engender trust. And trust derives from a disciplined alignment of what’s promised and what’s delivered.

The Future of Online Business: Envisioning Next Generation e-Commerce

From private sale sites like GILT and RueLaLa to flash sale sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, we are witnessing a renaissance of innovation in e-commerce. Call it e-Commerce 2.0. Anyone who manages a site or retail presence—and who is under pressure to respond intelligently to new developments in the online world—needs an overview of the emerging e-commerce landscape. From the importance of a social media strategy in engaging stakeholders to focusing on the tactics of today’s e-commerce juggernauts, Jeffrey Rayport emboldens audiences with the tools necessary to navigate this rapidly evolving online landscape.

Big Data: The Analytics Revolution

An analytics revolution is affecting organizations of all shapes and sizes. Cheap data storage and processing power in the Cloud combined with Web 2.0 tools mean that analytics are more powerful and more affordable than ever before. The prominence of Big Data means that businesses can monitor the behaviors of their customers to open up new opportunities to personalize service, integrate multiple channels to market and put power in the hands of customers as never before. Every executive who cares about the changing face of business needs a handle on how this revolution is changing the way firms must compete—and every executive needs to have a grasp on the pitfalls that many leaders face in focusing on the wrong data. No one can afford to get left behind the analytics revolution or to forego the advantages of effectively managing by the numbers.