Laurie Petersen

My 48 Hours as a Substitute Kindergarten Teacher in COVID-19

This is how desperate the education system is to get warm bodies into classrooms this year. Over the course of Labor Day weekend, I received not one, but two, offers to be a classroom teacher. Credit: Courtesy of Laurie Petersen While my career is…

When The Easiest Fix Is To Buy A New One

Working from home has its highs and lows, but a universal point of pain is when your computer decides to freeze and die. Let’s listen in on a real-world scenario from this past weekend involving a Dell laptop, a Microsoft update and freelance…

Danger: Don't Fall for the Phony 'AppleCare' Scam

As a freelancer who often writes about personal finances and careers, I like to think I’m above average in my knowledge of things related to money. But I felt pretty foolish when, in a vulnerable moment, I recently gave scammers direct access to my…

Arianna Huffington’s Propelify Interview: Embrace the Joy of Missing Out

We live in an age of addiction. To our phones. To being busy. Arianna Huffington aims to use our addictions to build her next mega-media/consulting/commerce company. To that end, she founded the six-month-old Thrive Global (New York). The founder of…

Marketers Need Cohesion In Understanding Customer Journey

Improving the customer experience was the top-ranked priority of more than 14,000 marketers and ecommerce professionals surveyed by Econsultancy for its 2017 Digital Intelligence Briefing, and a key point of differentiation will involve focusing on…

Service Design Must Be Managed Along With Product Design

Thomas Stewart and Patricia O’Connell, authors of Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy and the Art of Customer Delight (Harper Collins),say it’s time to recognize that the design of services needs to be managed with as much care as the design…

Customer Experience Wish List For 2017

Out with the old, in with the new. With the spirit of encouraging positive change, we crowd-sourced this list of 10 customer-experience annoyances everyone wishes would go away. 1. Disconnected customer service systems that require you to enter the…

Understanding The Customer Beats Lowering Prices

In their new book, The Intuitive Customer, authors Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton contend that companies experiencing plateaus in their Net Promoter Scores cannot combat declining customer loyalty by cutting prices and focusing on cost. “Understanding…

How They Got Hired After 50

Getting a job after 50 is tough. It now takes unemployed Americans age 55 to 64 about nine months to get hired, on average, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — two months longer than for the jobless overall. But here are stories of…

Striking The Right Chord Keeps Shoppers In The Mood

Getting customers in the right mood — whether at a hotel, retail establishment, restaurant or even doctor’s office — is part art, part science. The wrong sound, smell or sensory stimulation can be an immediate turnoff and even the right tone at the…

CX Is Not Just A Box To Check Off, Says Gartner's Ray

Augie Ray, research director for customer experience at Gartner, is an authoritative and opinionated resource for marketing leaders. We went back and forth with Ray on both the definition and the state of customer experience. Q: How does Gartner…

Flexibility Saves The Day At The DMV

In New Jersey, the state where my car is registered, a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles is avoided at any cost. Digital platforms blessedly make it possible to perform some routine government processes online -- such as renewing a vehicle…

Panelists Discuss Internet of Things Risks and Rewards at Feliciano Center

The internet of things and the data it yields are full of risks and rewards, and New Jersey is poised to get its share of both. So concluded a panel of investors, computer science educators and business execs who spoke about iot disruption at a…

Opinion: Propeller Shows Startup Momentum is Building on This Side of the Hudson

Laurie Petersen and friends at Propeller. Left is Larry Smith, partner, THEMATIX (NYC), middle is Rob Graham, CEO, Trainingcraft (NYC) and right is Walid Saba, co-founder and CTO of Klangoo, a Hoboken-based startup | Esther Surden It’s been six years…

Lessons Learned on a Trapeze

(This article previously appeared on MidcenturyModernMag.com.) It seemed like a great idea at the time. I booked a weekend retreat far off into the future at the Omega Institute, a place that always restores me. I enrolled in a leadership workshop…

Women and the Art of Negotiation Discussed at Montclair State

Better negotiation skills mean a better life. You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. With that in mind, the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship, at Montclair State University, hosted some female heavy-hitters at an event on…

Why I Quit My Job at 58 And Am So Much Happier

It was October and I had just enjoyed almost a year of successful self-employment as a writer, editor and conference producer; the birth of my first grandchild, new volunteer opportunities and a lot of travel — capped by a fabulous Hawaiian…

How I Went From Planned Parent To Suddenly Grandma

I have a man living in the house for the first time in 14 years. He laughs with me, tickles my toes, and likes my cleavage. I buy him books and music and T-shirts and we sing made-up songs together. I call him Lovey. It’s the first nickname that came…

Essex County Forum Urges Women to Pursue IT for Better Paying Jobs with a Future

Women can do anything when exposed to different career paths, and when they’re told that they can be anything. A recent panel discussion at Essex County College (Newark) drove home the message that information technology is where the jobs are, and…

At September Hack Jersey, Political Finance Laws, Campaign Spending Get Hacked

Journalism is becoming increasingly technology-dependent. Half the political stories require spreadsheet skills, and coders and reporters need to learn how to talk to one another. There was plenty of Excel spreadsheet training and more as Hack Jersey…