#131 - Greg Silverman, CEO Concentric Market - On the edge brands gain when tech enhances human insight

This podcast interview focuses on the technology and processes that bring people together to deliver transformative impact. My guest is Greg Silverman, CEO of Concentric Market.

Since 2010, he has been the CEO of Concentric, a enterprise decision support platform that improves your strategic planning process and your forecasting capabilities. Previously, he was Global Managing Director, Analytics and Valuation, for Interbrand, where he designed the current version of their Brand Valuation methodology and led their global consulting practice. He has also worked in manufacturing, franchising, and retail.

Greg received his BBA in Marketing and Retail from the University of Georgia and his MBA in Management from the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. He is the author of the book, Turning Complexity into Strategic Advantage and published the Interbrand Top 100 Brands Report.

Being an avid reader of the Interbrand brand report, this triggered me – and hence I invited Greg to my Podcast. We explore how brands deliver revenue and value, and how a lot of intangible and hard-to-observe components influence how they remain relevant in a market. We dig into the key role people play in all of this, and what role technology should play beyond just automation.

Here are some of his quotes:

On what makes them remarkable: Being a human in this day and age is hard. We have to just see people for their strengths and the fact that none of us are complete enough. And it's been the mission of the company actually to augment people's intelligence to help them be better people, enrich them.

Regarding the impact they have: There's still domain expertise. And that matters. You need inspiration. You need creativity. You need to understand the zeitgeist, and having quantifiable tools that help you understand the forward impact of that, has really been our mission.

About their offering, Greg says: ‘Can I forecast the future better than 50%?’ For our forecasts on a weekly basis, the standard we're held to is 95% accuracy. And that doesn't matter if that's weeks in advance, months in advance, and sometimes years in advance -- that has to be the standard because the only way you'll believe a predictive or prescriptive analytics is if it forecasts properly.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That you know your software platform is ready to scale when people come to you saying, ‘It’s time to fire us because the software is doing everything’.
2. Why when your software is making accurate predictions, you are only halfway in terms of the value you can deliver to your customers.
3. That integrity isn't not stealing from your neighbour. It's having a vision and sticking to it when the world doesn't want you to.
4. That everyone in your company at some point will have to face the fear of failure, but more importantly, face the fear of success.