Our friend and colleague Mark Coxon hosted the AVEC 2019 conference in New Orleans a few weeks ago. I already wrote
my thoughts on the conference up earlier, but you can see Mark's own take below. He was particularly inspired by adventure racer
Robyn Benincasa, who spoke about the connection between achieving difficult physical goals (like completing insane adventure races) and business.
Our other columnists today coincidentally write about the same topic from two different perspectives — Chris Gillespie from an end user perspective, and Anthony Coppedge more from an integrator perspective (although both are addressing integrators). In both cases, they encourage you to really listen and focus on what the customer needs rather than what on you want to sell (or can sell), and the long-term value that builds. That seems obvious, but there's still lots of money being spent on technology that either wasn't needed in the first place, or ends up being too complicated for a user to figure out. Check out their columns and leave your thoughts in the comments.