The strongest corporate cultures have a handful of core values that are deeply held by employees, shared widely throughout the organization, and consistently shape people's behavior. But most organizations struggle to achieve cultural consistency: Distinctive microcultures coexist, acquired companies retain their legacy cultures, and adherence to core values decays over time. Management consulting firm Bain & Company is an exception, based on our study of culture at more than 400 large companies. Bain also ranked first among all large U.S. employers on Glassdoor's Best Places to Work 2024 list, a distinction the company has achieved on five other occasions. Even more impressive, its culture has been consistently excellent over time and across geographies. Bain has been the top-ranked consulting firm on Glassdoor for 10 years in a row. When we analyzed how employees at global consulting firms rated their work culture by region, Bain ranked first in 18 of 22 countries. We recently discussed Bain's award-winning culture with Manny Maceda, who joined the firm in 1989 and is currently worldwide managing partner emeritus and incoming chair (effective January 2025). During that 35-year span, it became increasingly difficult to maintain cultural consistency, he said. 'We went from five offices to 68 offices around the world ' from recruiting from five schools to many schools ' from hiring mostly MBAs to now data scientists and advanced analytics ' and then we started acquiring companies,' Maceda observed....

This series is all about how to survive the Post-ZIRP era as a SaaS company, especially as markets commoditize and customer loyalty becomes harder to win, as I covered in part 1. In part 2, we talked about the increasingly important role of retention and expansion revenue. When that's your focus, your first job is to solve your customer's problems. If your product team is regularly engaged with your customers as recommended in my previous article, you'll know those problems to solve inside and out. There's a strong chance many other customers and prospects share the same challenges. Here's a common problem we've seen among many customers and prospects in the commerce industry: An overly complicated catalog management process. For example, the merchandiser can't make simple changes to the way products are bundled, combined or priced on their website. The result is a load of custom development work that doesn't need to happen if the merchandiser could simply self-serve. We learned in the process of speaking to both IT users and merchandisers that decoupling the product catalog solves this problem. We now have a product that makes it much easier for the merchandiser to make dynamic adjustments as they need to. We wouldn't have learned this if we weren't listening to customers ' and now our catalog management product is a major competitive differentiator....

According to one of Japan's oldest newspapers, an Osaka-based shower head maker called Science has developed a contraption that's shaped like a cockpit, fills with water when a bather sits in a seat at its center, and measures the person's pulse and other biological data via sensors to ensure the temperature is just right. It also 'projects images on the inside of [its] transparent cover to help the person feel refreshed,' says the outlet. Dubbed 'Mirai Ningen Sentakuki' (human washing machine of the future), the apparatus might never go on sale. Indeed, for now the company's plans for it appear limited to an expo in Osaka this April, where up to eight people can experience a 15-minute-long 'wash and dry' each day after first booking a reservation....

Today, Mayer is the CEO of her own company, Sunshine, which is creating apps to do things like share photos among groups more efficiently, clean up your contacts, and remember your friends' birthdays. While none of these apps has taken off yet, Mayer's background makes it worth considering her opinion as it relates to online advertising. On Wednesday at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in San Francisco, Mayer was asked how she envisions advertisers responding as AI tools change expectations from consumers about what information is available and how it's presented. 'One of the classic examples we used to talk about how ads make search better was concert tickets. When people search for concert tickets, the fact that there's an advertiser there that has tickets to sell you and they're willing to pay to be in your search results is actually a sign of quality, and it's also where the searcher actually is happy ' they don't want these articles about the concert they want to see; they actually want tickets to purchase. And so there's a nice meeting of expectations on both the advertiser and searcher side.'...