The iPhone’s software keyboard literally 1 reinvented the way we enter text on smartphones: not just because it eschewed the hardware keyboard for a software-based model, but also because of the variety of smart technologies it incorporated, such as autocorrect and tapping-and-holding for different characters. But despite the revolutionary nature of the keyboard, it’s remained largely unchanged since the iPhone’s introduction in 2007.

iOS 13, introduces, for the first time, an alternate way to enter text: swipe typing. 2 Instead of tapping on keys, you put your finger on the first letter and then slide it to the next letter and so on. Based on your finger movements and iOS’s dictionary, the system figures out what word you’re most likely trying to type.

Now, those with Android phones or who have used third-party apps like Google’s Gboard, SwiftKey, or Swype will rightfully point out that Apple didn’t invent this idea. But on iOS, swipe-typing has always been the province of third-party apps, and that’s limited its adoption.

iOS 13’s QuickPath keyboard is surprisingly good for a first effort. In the weeks that I’ve been using the betas, my biggest problem is simply remembering that the feature is there, so accustomed am I to tapping out my messages like someone from the long distant past who still hasn’t seen the series finale of Lost. It’s not error-proof by any means, but what problems I have encountered are outweighed by its convenience in many situations: for one thing, swipe typing when you’re holding your phone one-handed certainly feels a lot easier than tapping.

For those times when QuickPath doesn’t quite figure out what you’re going for, the predictive text bar above the keyboard does offer suggestions for other words that you might have been trying to type, though I maintain that iOS’s autocorrect system is still in need of an overhaul; for example, if you go back to correct a word you’ve already typed, the alternate suggestion system doesn’t seem to work quite as well. It’s also worth noting that, by default, tapping delete when you get the wrong word will delete the entire word, not just the last character, though you can change that option in Settings > General > Keyboard.

While bouncing back and forth between swipe- and tap-typing is seamless, this is also the source of my biggest frustration with QuickPath: You can’t swipe your way to any character that’s not on the main keyboard (i.e. numbers or punctuation). Right now, that gear-shifting slows my brain down a bit, but it’s something that I imagine I’ll adapt to in time.

Overall, I think the addition of QuickPath is a welcome one, though there remains the question of how many new users will be willing to change up their habits and how many users of existing third-party keyboard apps will give up the other advantages they offer. More to the point, though, I remain hopeful that Apple’s willingness to add a feature like swipe-typing means that it might actually improve other keyboard features that have remained stagnant for the last several years—but I suppose we’ll have to wait until iOS 14 for those.

Insight is rarely handed to you on a silver platter. Einstein argued that genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. While we can acknowledge that luck plays a role, we often use that as a crutch to avoid doing what we can do to intelligently prepare for opportunities.

We only get one life, “and it seems to be it is better to do significant things than to just get along through life to its end,” writes Richard Hamming in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn.

The book explores how we do great things. And wouldn’t we all like to do great things? But what are the methods we should employ in order to do great things? What are the mental disciplines that we should learn? Where do we start?

Hamming starts by arguing the way you live your life—the extent to which you intelligent prepare—makes a huge difference.

The major objection cited by people against striving to do great things is the belief it is all a matter of luck. I have repeatedly cited Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind”. It both admits there is an element of luck, and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed, or not, as you choose, from moment to moment, by the way you live your life.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 209)

In any great outcome, there is a component of luck. Yet if life were all about luck, the same people wouldn’t repeatedly do great things. Einstein did many great things. So did Newton. Elon Musk has been successful in multiple fields. The list goes on.

When someone repeatedly does great things it is because they prepared in advance to advance to recognize, work on, and fill in the blanks when necessary. This is the essence of intelligent preparation.

Intelligence comes in many forms and flavors. A lot of the time it’s not easily recognized — a lot of people who repeatedly do great things were poor students. IQ does not ensure academic success. Brains are nice to have but they are even better if you know how to use them.

How to Do Great Things

You need to believe that you are capable of doing important things. Your mindset determines how you experience things, what you work on, and the tactics and strategies you employ to accomplish those goals.

Among the important properties to have is the belief you can do important things. If you do not work on important problems how can you expect to do important work? Yet, direct observation, and direct questioning of people, shows most scientists spend most of their time working on things they believe are not important nor are they likely to lead to important things.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 210).

If what you are working on is not important and aligned with your goals—and a lot of what you do and say isn’t—then why are you doing it? The question you need to ask yourself if “why are you not working on and thinking about the important problems in your area?” How can we expect to achieve great things if we are not working on the right problems?

You need to be willing to look like an idiot. Think of this as confidence meets courage.

[Claude] Shannon had courage. Who else but a man with almost infinite courage would ever think of averaging over all random codes and expect the average code would be good? He knew what he was doing was important and pursued it intensely. Courage, or confidence, is a property to develop in yourself. Look at your successes, and pay less attention to failures than you are usually advised to do in the expression, “Learn from your mistakes”. While playing chess Shannon would often advance his queen boldly into the fray and say, “I ain’t scaird of nothing”. I learned to repeat it to myself when stuck, and at times it has enabled me to go on to a success. I deliberately copied a part of the style of a great scientist. The courage to continue is essential since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragements.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

You need to strive for excellence. This isn’t as easy as it sounds but it as an essential feature of doing great work.

Without such a goal you will tend to wander like a drunken sailor. The sailor takes one step in one direction and the next in some independent direction. As a result the steps tend to cancel each other, and the expected distance from the starting point is proportional to the square root of the number of steps taken. With a vision of excellence, and with the goal of doing significant work, there is tendency for the steps to go in the same direction and thus go a distance proportional to the number of steps taken, which in a lifetime is a large number indeed.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

The conditions you think you want are rarely the ones that help you produce your best work. You need the feedback of reality in order to keep your feet planted on the ground.

Age is a factor physicists and mathematicians worry about. It is easily observed the greatest work of a theoretical physicist, mathematician, or astrophysicist, is generally done very early. They may continue to do good work all their lives, but what society ends up valuing most is almost always their earliest great work. The exceptions are very, very few indeed. But in literature, music composition, and politics, age seems to be an asset. The best compositions of a composer are usually the late ones, as judged by popular opinion.

One reason for this is fame in Science is a curse to quality productivity, though it tends to supply all the tools and freedom you want to do great things. Another reason is most famous people, sooner or later, tend to think they can only work on important problems—hence they fail to plant the little acorns which grow into the mighty oak trees. I have seen it many times, from Brattain of transistor fame and a Nobel Prize to Shannon and his Information Theory. Not that you should merely work on random things—but on small things which seem to you to have the possibility of future growth. In my opinion the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J has ruined more great scientists than any other place has created—considering what they did before ore and what they did after going there. A few, like von Neumann, escaped the closed atmosphere of the place with all its physical comforts and prestige, and continued to contribute to the advancement of Science, but most remained there and continued to work on the same problems which got them there but which were generally no longer of great importance to society.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

Work with your door open.

Working with one’s door closed lets you get more work done per year than if you had an open door, but I have observed repeatedly later those with the closed doors, while working just as hard as others, seem to work on slightly the wrong problems, while those who have let their door stay open get less work done but tend to work on the right problems! I cannot prove the cause and effect relationship, I only observed the correlation. I suspect the open mind leads to the open door, and the open door tends to lead to the open mind; they reinforce each other.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

People who do great things typically have a great drive to do things.

I had worked with John Tukey for some years before I found he was essentially my age, so I went to our mutual boss and asked him, “How can anyone my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back, grinned, and said, “You would be surprised how much you would know if you had worked as hard as he has for as many years”. There was nothing for me to do but slink out of his office, which I did. I thought about the remark for some weeks and decided, while I could never work as hard as John did, I could do a lot better than I had been doing.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 212)

Focused investment of only one hour a day can double your lifetime output. Intelligent preparation is like compound interest, the more you invest, the more situations you can handle, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. The investment of one hour a day by Charlie Munger to learning new things is an overlooked gem hiding in plain sight.

This isn’t about who works the hardest but rather who focuses their limited energy on the right things. Learning things that (1) change slowly and (2) apply to a wide variety of situations could be a better use of time than learning something incredibly time-consuming, rapidly changing, and of limited application.

Hamming dedicated his Friday afternoons to “great thoughts.” Setting aside time to think is a common charasteristic of people that do great things. Not only does this help you live consciously it helps get your head out of the weeds. The rest of us are too busy with the details to ask if we’re going in the right direction.

People who do great things tolerate ambiguity — they can both believe and not believe at the same time.

You must be able to believe your organization and field of research is the best there is, but also there is much room for improvement! You can sort of see why this is a necessary trait If you believe too much you will not likely see the chances for significant improvements, you will see believe enough you will be filled with doubts and get very little chances for only the 2%, 5%, and 10% improvements; if you do not done. I have not the faintest idea of how to teach the tolerance of ambiguity, both belief and disbelief at the same time, but great people do it all the time. Most great people also have 10 to 20 problems they regard as basic and of great importance, and which they currently do not know how to solve. They keep them in their mind, hoping to get a clue as to how to solve them. When a clue does appear they generally drop other things and get to work immediately on the important problem. Therefore they tend to come in first, and the others who come in later are soon forgotten. I must warn you however, the importance of the result is not the measure of the importance of the problem. The three problems in Physics, antigravity, teleportation, and time travel are seldom worked on because we have so few clues as to how to start—a problem is important partly because there is a possible attack on it, and not because of its inherent importance.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 213)

If you find yourself blaming your (mental) tools, do something about it. Learn the mental models, listen to great people talk in detail about their experiences, and more importantly take ownership. Moving foward requires change but change does not mean that you are moving foward. As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

The post How to Do Great Things appeared first on Farnam Street.

Five months into Uber’s campaign to improve relations with its drivers, the company has inked a deal with Volvo to buy tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles that could eventually replace them.

The non-exclusive deal is one of the largest commercial orders for self-driving cars yet, building on a $300 million partnership Uber and Volvo struck in August 2016. Under terms announced today (Nov. 20), Volvo will sell Uber around 24,000 “base cars” modeled on its popular XC90, a luxury SUV, from 2019 to 2021. Uber will modify the XC90s with autonomous technology developed by its self-driving division, the Advanced Technologies Group.

The purchase highlights the delicate line Uber has been forced to walk as it pursues driverless technology while also trying to keep its current workforce of more than 2 million drivers happy. The company has spent nearly half of 2017 revising driver earnings and perks to make the job more appealing under a program called “180 Days of Change.” At the same time, driver labor is the biggest cost to Uber’s core ride-hailing service, and the company is banking on self-driving taxis to make the model more viable.

“It only becomes a commercial business when you can remove that vehicle operator from the equation,” Jeff Miller, Uber’s head of automotive alliances, told Reuters.

Retail prices for a standard XC90 typically start around $50,000. Volvo told Reuters it would sell the XC90s to Uber at roughly the same profit margin it sells through dealers, suggesting Uber’s total purchase could top $1 billion. The ride-hailing company, technically valued at $70 billion in its recent deal with SoftBank, has been hemorrhaging more than $600 million a quarter.

Uber wasn’t immediately available to comment, and Volvo deferred questions to Uber.

Uber’s main US competitor, Lyft, also has ambitions to build an autonomous fleet, as do many traditional automakers, who believe shared “mobility” will likely replace car ownership in the future. Financial services firm UBS predicts so-called robotaxis will be common in urban areas by 2030, and that relying on driverless taxis will cost half as much as owning a car.

Uber remains embroiled in a lawsuit with Waymo, the self-driving carmaker spun out from Alphabet, for alleged theft of trade secrets. That case is expected to head to trial in December.

This post was updated to include additional information from Uber.

One of the most exciting and — sometimes anxiety-producing transitions in a career — comes when you move from being an individual contributor to becoming a manager. At this juncture, what you think, what you say, and how you show up — in effect, your leadership presence — can have a direct impact on those you are now leading and managing for the first time. So, as a new manager, how do you build an authentic and connected leadership presence that has a positive impact on your team and colleagues?

Set a leadership values-based goal. An authentic and connected presence begins from the inside-out. How you define the role and what you value will “telegraph” out to those you work with. As a new manager, spend time to consider the kind of leader you are and hope to be. Set an aspirational goal to serve as a guiding compass. As one new manager shared recently, “my professional leadership goal is to be a genuine and emotionally intelligent manager who inspires others to excellence.”

You and Your Team Series

Becoming a Manager

As Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel describe in their book, The Leadership Pipeline, “Though this might seem like an easy, natural leadership passage, it’s often one where people trip…they make the job transition from individual contribution to manager without making a behavioral or values-based transition…They must believe that making time for others, planning, [and] coaching…are necessary tasks and their responsibility. More than that, they must view this other-directed work as mission-critical to their success.”

Increase your emotional intelligence and situational awareness. As the job now shifts to getting more work done through others, recognize that what motivates or influences you may not be how others are motivated or influenced. In advance of important interactions or meetings, ask yourself:

• Who is the other person or audience?
• What might their perspective on this topic be?
• How are they best motivated or influenced?
• What does the situation at hand call for?
• What are the optimal outcomes and tone?

These questions remind us that leadership presence is not about finding a one-size-fits-all solution. Leadership presence is therefore an “and/both” versus an “either/or.” On the one hand, having an effective leadership presence includes being authentic, genuine, and clear on your guiding compass, core values and convictions. And, on the other hand, it includes being adaptive and agile, demonstrating an ability to connect with different kinds of people through many different communication platforms and technologies.

Be clear and direct, always with respect. As your new role will likely increase your interactions with people of many different styles, having an effective leadership presence includes continually building and practicing the skills of being clear and direct while finding ways of making connections and showing respect. Leadership presence is dynamic and fluid, and encourages a two-way dialogue where we can give authentic voice to our views while staying open to the views and perspectives of others as we work towards a common goal, best outcome, or solution. A few examples of things that can help cultivate your own voice and listen to the voices of others:

• Know what you think. If you are naturally strong at listening and hearing other’s opinions, flex your muscles in getting to your own convictions and thoughts more quickly.  Before important meetings or interactions, jot down a few bullet points to yourself: what are the 3-5 things I believe about this topic or issue?

• Ask, listen, and acknowledge: Conversely, if you are naturally strong at having your own opinions, settle into a greater patience, so that you can make space to hear others. Show you are really listening by asking great questions, clarifying what you’ve heard, or acknowledging how you’re processing the information. In some cases, you might share: “With this new information, I am experiencing this quite differently. My view has changed.” In other cases, you might end up saying: “In digesting what you have shared, I am finding I just can’t get myself comfortable with that direction. Ultimately, this is coming down to a difference of opinion.”

• Share the WHY: As a new manager, it’s also critical to share the WHY behind your vision, priorities, expectations, feedback, or requests. Don’t dilute your message. Instead, make it more powerful by sharing more about the context. Help connect work deliverables or professional development to what’s happening at the organizational level. For example, in giving developmental feedback to someone, you could include additional context such as: Because the organization is growing so fast, there is opportunity for each member of the team to stretch and step up in the following ways. I’d love to see you take on….” Or, you can strengthen the message by painting the picture of the aspiration: “I’d love to see us become best in class at this, and here’s what will be required.”

Bring a stable and grounded presence in the face of change, stress, or difficult news. The reality is that most of us can exude an effective presence, especially when business is going well or when we are having a good day. As a new manager, however, it’s equally important to ask yourself: What do people experience when I’m stressed out, tired, under deadline, or when someone is bringing me bad news?

Recognize that what may feel like a passing or fleeting moment of anger, impatience, or hurried insincerity may end up negatively impacting your team and its overall morale and engagement. As author Daniel Goleman writes in his book Primal Leadership: “Quite simply, in any human group, the leader has maximal power to sway everyone’s emotions…how well leaders manage their moods affects everyone else’s moods, which becomes not just a private matter, but a factor in how well a business will do.”

Maintaining a stable and grounded presence increases the likelihood that your team will feel comfortable bringing you important information, even if it’s bad news, so that you can help to remove obstacles, reset priorities, or get the team back on track. Professor Amy Edmundson’s research finds that teams can optimize their learning and performance when there is an environment or culture — most often set by the manager — that promotes both psychological safety and accountability.

To help maintain and sustain a more stable and grounded presence, be sure that you are setting the right priorities for yourself, and that you have strategies for managing the workload of being a leader, as you take on this larger role and responsibility as a new manager.

Becoming a new manager is an important leadership passage in your career. Step back and think about your leadership presence and if you are thinking, saying, and showing up as you most hope to and intend. Set a values-based leadership goal, increase your emotional intelligence and situational awareness, be direct with respect, and find strategies to maintain and sustain a stable and grounded presence. It’s easy in our humbleness to underestimate the impact we have on other’s lives as managers.

As professor Clayton Christensen writes in his classic HBR article, “How Will You Measure Your Life?”: “In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then, I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem — feeling that she had learned a lot, had been recognized for achieving valuable things, and had played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives.  I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent.  My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility, be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.”

When it comes to creating a more data-and-analytics-driven workforce, many companies make the mistake of conflating analytics training with data adoption. While training is indeed critical, having an adoption plan in place is even more essential.

Any good adoption plan should focus on continual learning. This might include online or recorded refresher sessions; mentors; online resources for questions, feedback, and new ideas; or a certification process. It might even mean rethinking your organization’s structure or core technologies. Based on my experience, here are three ways leaders can shift a company culture from a one-and-done focus on “training” employees in analytics to an “always on” focus on analytics adoption:

Form competency centers. At a high level, a competency center is a collection of domain experts who are given a goal to improve agility, foster innovation, establish best practices, provide training (and mentoring), and be a communications engine. These centers should be “owned and operated” by highly competent individual contributors with relevant expertise. Competency centers can be established by any type of focus area and require a lead, members, and a sponsor. As part of their mission, competency centers should be answering the “why” questions instead of the “what” questions. For example: Why do we analyze data? Why is data quality important? “Why” questions are about establishing a purpose and direction that will help guide focus and priorities. “What” questions (What are the results? What reports do we need? What data is missing?), in contrast, are about the details, and shouldn’t be the main focus of a competency center.

Create a leadership and development portal. Think about creating a leadership and development portal to house your company’s knowledge and to enable your team to easily share and learn from each other. Ask team members to identify their development needs around topics such as digital platforms, analytical and customer journey marketing, industry-specific training, leadership skills, presentation skills, and product training. Then ask them to create a personal development plan. It shouldn’t end there, because as a leader you need to regularly communicate that developing and learning are a priority. Expect team members to not only use the information in the portal but also contribute their expertise and experience to it. Set an expectation that team members regularly review development plans with their managers to instill an understanding that their ongoing development is a collaboration and a shared responsibility. Our development portal resides in Microsoft SharePoint, which provides instant, easy access from all of our offices across the globe. From the portal, team members can browse information on a wide range of topics, including analytical marketing, customer journey marketing, and product training, in a variety of formats (webcasts, online certification programs, white papers, how-to guides, and more).

Build certification into your training. Just as it’s important to provide different learning formats for different types of learners, it is equally important to provide employees with regular acknowledgement and praise. Certification is an important part of recognition as well as assessment. Your certification program should test for both basic and advanced proficiency in topics such as analytics and data stewardship. For example, marketers can design go-to marketing plans with an integrated channel strategy, and continually monitor and measure results by incorporating test plans that encourage a level of agility where changes can be made based on the performance of the campaigns.

Let’s not kid ourselves — change is a difficult journey, and leading change requires a plan. Consider training a starting point. Adoption requires ongoing vigilance and refining your course to keep you from straying from your goals.

To motivate, manage, and reward B2B salespeople, many companies use sales incentive plans that link large commissions or bonuses to individual results metrics, such as territory quota achievement. As digital channels continue to reduce and redefine salespeople’s role in customer buying, these traditional sales incentive plans are becoming less effective at driving sales outcomes.

The right sales incentive plan creates a double win. Salespeople win because they are rewarded for their hard work and good performance. The company wins through a better-motivated sales team that produces short-term results and is more likely to achieve company goals.

For a sales incentive plan to produce this double win, there are two necessary conditions:

• Salespeople must have a large impact on sales results by focusing on activities that add value and directly influence customer buying decisions.
• The company must have the ability to measure individual results by separating out each salesperson’s contribution and determining how much an individual’s actions affect the outcome.

Today’s multichannel world increasingly challenges both of these conditions.

Before the proliferation of digital information and buying channels, buyers usually relied on field salespeople’s help and expertise when purchasing. Salespeople “owned” relationships with customers, and had considerable impact on purchase decisions. This made it easy to measure individual sales results. In many cases, incentives linked to sales performance were an effective way to motivate and reward individual salespeople.

Today digital channels make buyers more informed, connected, and socially influenced. Buyers no longer view salespeople as their primary connection to companies they want to do business with. For simple product purchases such as office supplies, many buyers are self-sufficient. They get information online and purchase through websites supported by inside sales and service. Field salespeople no longer have impact on buying decisions. The first necessary condition is no longer true.

For complex solution purchases such as customized manufacturing equipment, buyers usually rely on a combination of digital channels and salespeople. The internet allows buyers to easily gather preliminary information about solution alternatives. But when solutions are complex and expensive, digital channels are usually not enough. Buyers want to collaborate with salespeople to reduce uncertainty. Often, they want input from multiple salespeople and technical specialists from the solution provider, in addition to help from digital channels. Salespeople have impact on purchase decisions. But because that impact is shared with multiple sales roles and digital channels, the company’s ability to measure impact and attribute it to a specific salesperson is limited. The second necessary condition is no longer true.

More and more selling situations today are failing to meet one or both necessary conditions for traditional sales incentives to work. Multiple influences on buying reduce individual salespeople’s impact and the ability to measure it. This blurs the connection between individual effort, results, and incentive pay in the minds of salespeople. Incentives become fuzzy and are no longer effective at rewarding and motivating individuals.

New Sales Management and Culture

Companies can no longer rely on large, individual, short-term sales incentives as a primary means of managing salespeople. Instead, they must change their sales compensation plans while emphasizing other ways to direct salespeople and shape sales culture.

Sales leaders must change compensation plans to look more like management bonus plans, designed to encourage people to work together to make the company and its customers more competitive and prosperous in the long run. Changes include:

• Changing the metrics for determining incentive pay. Instead of short-term individual results (for example, quarterly territory sales), the metrics that determine pay should reflect annual company and team performance, along with individual effort contributing to team results (for example, going above and beyond to meet with key decision makers or to engage product specialists to help customers).
• Shifting the pay mix more toward salary. Companies should also provide a smaller (but still reasonable) incentive opportunity for salespeople.

In addition to changing sales compensation, sales leaders and managers must take a more active role in managing salespeople. This involves changes such as:

• Deploying new sales team structures. They must work alongside other channels (internet, inside sales) to meet customer needs.
• Hiring salespeople with new capabilities. In addition to having solution sales skills, they should be comfortable using digital communication (email, video calls, social media) with customers, appreciate the value of analytics for enhancing the sales process, and be able to orchestrate customer buying across multiple channels.
• Using performance management, coaching, training, and sales data and tools. Guide salespeople instead of relying on incentives as a primary means of controlling sales activity.
• Establishing a new sales culture. It should be focused on teamwork and customer success.

Incentives are embedded in the culture of many sales forces, and changing that culture may be difficult. Yet change is necessary for companies to affect sales force behavior and drive results in today’s multichannel sales environment.