Gel speaker update: Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer Gel '03, Google's VP of search products and user experience, is featured as one of BusinessWeek's "25 Masters of Innovation".

From Marissa Mayer: The Talent Scout:

An enormous global talent hunt is under way, with companies shifting from process and quality control to creativity and empathy as the key competitive edge. Mayer gets this. She still personally approves every hire for the products group at the 6,000-plus person company.

She also lists goodexperience.com as one of her picks of blogs and books.

(See also: my interview of Marissa, about Google's customer experience, from October 2002)

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Thanks to Joyce pointing me to this and two other key items from the BizWeek article: "Peer Insight has developed an index that correlates quality of consumer experience to stock price"... and this bit about Patrick Whitney, Director of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago...

Whitney believes that companies today face an "innovation gap". They have the tools of technology to make virtually anything, but lack the tools of empathy to understand what consumers really want. Filling this gap is the task at hand. It is also the sweet spot for top-line growth and high-margin profit.

(For more thoughts on empathy and customer experience, see the Good Experience worldview.)

• Jun 10, 2006
• IN: Gel
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