"During my workshop," Elizabeth Petersen, executive vice president, health care for BLR, said, "I'll be sharing our process and the forms that we use to ensure all departments are involved from the start."

"Companies do not ask customers what they want [enough]," Arno Langbehn, CEO, B. Behr's Verlag GmbH & Co. KG in Hamburg, Germany, told a large SIPA audience two years ago in a wonderful keynote. "'We are not in the coffee business serving people,'" he said, quoting a successful brand. "'We are in the people business serving coffee.' Customers only buy when they see themselves [getting] a benefit from it."

I was bicycle riding on our Rails to Trails path on Sunday when a small girl, maybe two years old, wandered away from her parents and onto the path. It's a busy area so I stay pretty aware when I ride there, and was fortunate to be able to stop short. When I started again, a rider coming in the other direction shouted, "Good reaction time!" to me.