"If you're looking for a way to build your marketing list—and a loyal constituency of prospects—consider following Diversified Communications' no-cost-to-join association model," Jim Sinkinson of Fired Up! Marketing says.

"[Director Sam] Mendes is known for creating 'a safe room' for rehearsals. 'People are free to have a bad idea. Frequently the bad idea illuminates where the great idea is,' [producer Scott] Rudin said. 'Sam makes the room embracing, warm.  He's very open about what he perceives to be his own mistakes. If he doesn't know something, he's entirely comfortable asking the questions. That makes people feel incredibly well protected.'" —A recent New Yorker profile by John Lahr on award-winning theater and film director (Oscar winner for American Beauty) Sam Mendes.

Like many industries that date back awhile, business valuation has a lot of older white men. Towards the end of an honest, funny, hopeful and proud women's leadership panel at SIPA Annual 2018 in June, Lucretia Lyons, president of Business Valuation Resources, related a story.

"We launched an association that exceeded our expectations in a few months," said Elizabeth Petersen, project director, Simplify Compliance, referring to the National Association of Healthcare Revenue Integrity. "We were looking at registrations for events and one of my product people noticed, 'There's a new title popping up and we had never seen this title before'—it was revenue integrity specialist. We started picking up the phone and calling customers, [asking], 'What does that mean?'"

I attended the Annapolis (Md.) Film Festival over the weekend and besides the impressive films—I still recall Itzhak Perlman talking about not making live events feel too rehearsed in a documentary about his extraordinary life—I was really impressed by their survey method.

"During my early years in the company, I was fairly analytical in how I approached most situations. And although that served a purpose, I later realized that you can be much more effective if you recognize the importance of people in business. The sooner you learn about reading people, listening to others and building relationships, the sooner you will be more effective."

Customer experience is certainly not a new thing. Back in 1997, Steve Jobs said this to a large audience:

Towards the end of a takeaway-stuffed session at our BIMS conference in November titled Bringing Customers Into Your Marketing, Fulfillment & Product Development, Jim Sinkinson of Fired Up! Marketing asked his fellow panelists this: "Do you ever get to the point of asking customers or prospects, 'Would you buy it [if we built it]'? How do you get as close as possible to the answer in your interactions with customers?"

Adam Steltzner, a rocket scientist for the NASA Mars rover missions, opened ASAE's Technology Conference & Expo this week and spoke about brainstorming. After spearheading the successful Mars Rover landing in 2012, he learned this: