Authors Posts by Andrea Olson
Andrea Olson
Andrea Olson is a speaker, author, behavioral economics and customer-centricity expert. As the CEO of Pragmadik, she helps organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to Fortune 500, and has served as an outside consultant for EY and McKinsey. Andrea is the author of The Customer Mission: Why it’s time to cut the $*&% and get back to the business of understanding customers and No Disruptions: The future for mid-market manufacturing.
She is a four-time ADDY® award winner and host of the popular Customer Mission podcast. Her thoughts have been featured in news sources such as Chief Executive Magazine, Customer Experience Magazine, Industry Week, and more. Andrea is a sought-after keynote speaker at conferences and corporate events throughout the world. She is a visiting lecturer at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, a TEDx presenter and TEDx speaker coach. She is also a mentor at the University of Iowa Venture School.
Why Your Data Isn’t Helping You Make Decisions
We all like to have data to support our decisions. But we tend to look at this myopically - a decision needs to be...
Why We Misunderstand Strategy
Strategy is a term bantered around a bit too much. We apply it to almost everything within business to subconsciously create an air of...
Why We Need to Redefine Employee Engagement
If you Google "Employee Engagement" and look for images representing it, you'll find groups of people in business attire smiling, high-fiving, laughing, or conducting...
Want to be Data-Driven? It’s Not About the Tech
Executives say that cultural challenges — not technological ones — represent the biggest impediment around data initiatives.In a 2021 survey from NewVantage Partners, 92.2...
Numbers: Do You Have a Quantification Addiction?
We love numbers. We're quite obsessed with them. Everything we do in business has to be measured and tracked in a nice, neat metric,...
Why Positioning Is More Important Than Ever
There was a great book published back in 2001 called "Positioning" by Al Ries and Jack Trout. It emphasized the importance and impact of...
Moving Learning Online?
Andrea writes original articles across a spectrum of topics, providing unique insights to leadership, culture change, organizational engagement, customer insights, and communications.
So now that...
Overly Lean Organizations Are Less Resilient
Lean is all about simplification, streamlining, and eliminating waste. What could be bad about that? It has been found to not only improve consistency...
A Pandemic Shows How Organizations Can Change Faster Than They Think
The coronavirus pandemic has transformed our world virtually overnight. Companies have had to change on a dime how they operate and communicate. While this...
Why Organizational Leaders Often Misdiagnosis Problems
Every leader wants to fix the problems in their organization. The issue is, that most leaders have a hard time diagnosing those problems correctly....
