KACHARAGADLA

User-centric firms should identify and track the core actions that can make or break their businesses. Traditionally, executives have used standard metrics, such as cash flow, inventory turns and operating income, to get a broad sense of the health of their firm. However, the game has changed with the rise of digital business models centered on the user. New metrics need to be devised based on the core user actions that drive value creation in such models. Threadless, an online T-shirt retailer, crowdsources its designs from a community of designers and curates the best designs through a social rating mechanism. Threadless relies on two core user actions: the upload of new designs by designers and the voting on designs by the Threadless community. A failure by the community to provide adequate feedback on designs would discourage designers from uploading new ones in the future, leading to a downward spiral. To ensure a healthy and scalable business model, Threadless needs to ac

Lenovo is one of the world's leading personal technology companies, producing innovative PCs and mobile internet devices. A global Fortune 500 company, Lenovo is the world's largest PC vendor and largest smartphone company. Although the Lenovo brand only

A study of successful board chairs across countries shows how they engage, enable and encourage boards Boards of directors often get media attention when something goes wrong. The board of VW, for instance, was recently in the news after it received a terrible corporate governance rating based on the 2015 emissions scandal and its fallout. Examples of how not to behave as a board are easy to come by. Yet most boards are not like VW’s because they use good governance to work well. To find out what makes a board chair successful, the INSEAD Corporate Governance Initiative conducted 74 face-to-face interviews with experienced board chairs to produce a research project spanning nine countries – Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Since boards of directors are not always transparent, and the role of their chairs doesn’t come with a handbook, we hope this report will shed light on the workings of board chairs.

In 2016  Alexandr Wang, 20 , took time off from his graduate computer science studies at MIT. He headed to Silicon Valley to join his friend and fellow developer  Lucy Guo, 23 . Two years  earlier, Guo - a 2014 Thiel Fellow - had left her senior year at Carnegie Mellon to pursue her own tech career.  Now, little more than a year after Wang left Cambridge, the two are leading a $4.7-million startup.  Scale , “The API of Human Intelligence,” serves such giants as Alphabet, P&G, GM Cruise and more. From high school dropouts to Stanford Ph.D’s, most of the  Forbes 2018 30 Under 30 Class in Enterprise Tech  are augmenting Artificial Intelligence with indispensable human skills.  Both Wang and Guo have substantial experience in tech, including stints at Snap and Quora. So they know that despite the considerable hype AI is, as they describe it, “not ready for prime time.” And, like much of this year’s class, they took risks to create something new. Scale offers immediate access t

As a brand, social media is one of your biggest assets. Here's some advice from the experts at VSCO. As an  entrepreneur  or small-business owner,  social media  should be a top priority. From promoting your products to building a community to developing your  brand's voice  -- the benefits of having a solid grasp on your business's social media presence is essential to the success and appeal of your company. But don't worry, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on fancy equipment or hire a third-party agency to do it for you. But that doesn't mean just throwing a bunch of random pictures up on Instagram either. Instead, it's important to be thoughtful, listen to your audience, learn a few quick and easy camera tricks (yes, you can use your smartphone) and eventually, build a voice, a community and a large following. To help you achieve all of these things, we've brought in some help from photography app  VSCO 's Kendal Kulley, an a

A Dutch design student proposes a common-sense alternative to the way most home goods are sold today. Look at any label on a household product, from laundry detergent to dish soap to shampoo, and you’ll see that most are 80% water. Across billions of units, shipped around the world, that adds up to a huge amount of extra weight–which means more packaging wasted, more fuel needed, and more pollution produced. What if each product was distilled down to its non-water ingredients and sold as a solid? That’s the idea behind the designer  Mirjam de Bruijn ‘s project  Twenty , a concept for packaging where these products are sold in solid form. Once you’ve bought your shampoo pellets, you simply put them in a reusable bottle, and add water. [Photo: Mirjam Lois de Bruijn ] If the concept, which is de Bruijn’s thesis for the Design Academy Eindhoven, were to be widely adopted, she estimates the average plastic packaging per person in the Netherlands would reduce significantly.