In January 2018, I wrote a post with Albert Einstein's quote as a title - The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Then, about a year ago, I placed Einstein's quote again in the title line for another post in the Talent Blog, or as it is called now, Skill and Talent Management Blog - I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. I like quotes. I simply do. Often, it is possible to capture many thoughts in just one sentence. Like this one by John Maeda from his book The Laws of Simplicity - "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful." Think about it. It is a Design Thinking process captured in a sentence that focuses on the value generated. Something meaningful has more value than something obvious.

I wrote numerous posts with a quote in the title line, but for some reason, those two account for one of the two most visited pages on the Ibbaka website. Why is that? I can only imagine that because Albert Einstein was one of the few who managed to peek behind the veil and see what reality is and how time can be comprehended, so no surprise having one of his quotes as a title will generate traffic. But, to be honest, this was not why I selected his quote for the title of my post. As I said, I have used quotes from James Joyce, Paul Signac, Vincent van Gogh, Thelonious Monk, and Oscar Niemeyer, to name a few. However, only those two generated a lot of interest, which, as I said, is not that surprising. However, when I look at the analytics, I see that whoever visits the page is not immediately leaving it, with an average visit ranging between four and almost six minutes! In other words, the visitors engage in reading. Of course, they leave the page afterwards, as indicated by the exit rate, but still, it is not a click-in and out. Why is that? Is there a chance that I managed to create some value for the visitor? I hope I did. That's the whole point of writing.

When I started contributing to this blog, I wanted to see if I could approach it—a business blog, in essence—from a different perspective. I am not a business person. I am a designer. However, it is not the actual design that excites me the most - the process or the design journey makes it interesting. And connecting themes or ideas is, for me, the ultimate goal.

Last July, we went through a rebranding exercise, which resulted in the birth of Ibbaka Valio and Ibbaka Talio, with Ibbaka Valio being the driving force. For Ibbaka, for all of us, Value always was and is at the centre of what we are doing. The first piece of text on the Ibbaka home page states, "Justify Value. Drive Revenue for Growth." And again, in the leading paragraph, we wrote, "Ibbaka provides software and expertise to enable business growth by optimizing revenue performance through customer value management and talent optimization."

Interestingly, I was reviewing an article on the Decision Link Blog titled The Value Realization Imperative by Stephan Liozu. Customer value management (CVM) is front and centre in this publication for a reason. Stephan points out, "How will companies rethink their business model and their go-to-market strategies? And most importantly, how will they support their customers while they also go through turbulence of their own?" Understanding and measuring value from the customer's perspective is the key, especially in the current, unpredictable economy. So while everyone thinks about the future, planning to avoid the worst, perhaps we could draw from the title line and, instead of focusing on the worst, let's look at success and the value we can provide. Exactly why we are now placing a lot of energy on Ibbaka Valio - it is designed to help companies succeed with new products and price performance.

PS. I am again placing a quote from Albert Einstein in the title line. I am curious if it will boost the traffic to the blog, but even more, I am excited because I know how much value Ibbaka Valio can generate - after all, understanding value is critical, isn't it?