San Francisco Seminar 2005

The San Francisco Seminar 2005 built on the experiences of the previous year and explored how companies could combine CRM, multichannel strategy, and innovation in practice.

Minimalist illustration of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, rendered in a dark blue style against a light background. The iconic suspension bridge, with its distinctive towers and cables, symbolizes connections, innovation, optimism about the future, and the journey into Silicon Valley’s technology ecosystem. The illustration is used as a visual identifier for the San Francisco Seminar 2005 and represents the intersection of technology, digitalization, entrepreneurship, and international knowledge sharing. The Golden Gate Bridge serves both as a geographic symbol of San Francisco and as a metaphor for building bridges between people, ideas, business, and academia. The simple and clear graphic style fits the website’s overall visual identity, with its focus on learning, reflection, innovation, and professional development.

Introduction and Reflection

March 2005, San Francisco. The digital transformation was well underway, and the dot-com crisis was already history. In this environment, leaders, researchers, and innovators came together to explore how companies could build profitable growth through customer centricity, multichannel strategy, and technological integration.

The seminar marked a shift in the understanding of what e-business was really about. From technology and websites—to culture, data, and customer experience. “Think Big – Start Small – Scale Fast” was the recurring mantra.

Program Overview

The seminar took place over five days, with lectures and company visits at organizations including:

Oracle
IBM
Wells Fargo
Sherwin-Williams
Harrah’s Entertainment
Hilton

Lectures by leading academics such as Florian Zettelmeyer, Kirthi Kalyanam, Dale Achabal, and Phillip Gordon gave participants a deeper understanding of the relationship between strategy, technology, and customer insight.

Key Academic Themes

Three main themes ran through all the presentations:

How to build customer orientation across channels.
How to use data to create value and loyalty.
How to embed innovation as a culture, not a project.

Zettelmeyer showed that CRM often fails because it is reduced to an IT project.
Kalyanam developed the four-step model for Multi-Channel Retail Optimization.
Oracle and IBM demonstrated how architecture and integration enable scalability.
Achabal introduced the concept of Intelligent Retailing.

Watercolor illustration of the Golden Gate Bridge viewed from the marina in San Francisco Bay, surrounded by sailboats, docks, and calm water in warm morning or evening tones. The iconic bridge stretches majestically across the bay and symbolizes connections between people, ideas, technology, and cultures. The illustration is used as part of the San Francisco Seminar 2005 and represents Silicon Valley, innovation, digitalization, and international knowledge sharing. The soft watercolor tones give the scene a calm and reflective atmosphere, while also conveying the sense of freedom, innovation, and optimism about the future that characterized the San Francisco seminars. The sailboats and marina setting highlight the city’s maritime history and the distinctive atmosphere of San Francisco Bay.

Case Studies

Phillip Gordon - Lessons Learned from Online Innovators

He summed up the dot-com era in clear terms: “The Internet is not a strategy—it is a channel.” The companies that survived focused on integration—not isolation.

Staples: Removed 7 clicks from checkout—sales increased by 491%.
Nordstrom: Transferred its service culture online.
Lands’ End: Virtual try-on reduced returns.

Key Learning: Usability and brand consistency deliver results.

Florian Zettelmeyer – Why CRM Fails

CRM fails when the organization itself does not change. He introduced the IDIC model (a model in Customer Relationship Management—Identify, Differentiate, Interact, Customize) and showed how companies such as American Airlines and Safeway used customer data to build loyalty and increase sales.

Key Learning: CRM is a cultural transformation—not an IT system.

Kirthi Kalyanam – Multi-Channel Systems

He described the journey from Presence to Optimization, and how integration across stores, online channels, and customer service creates value.

Synergy across channels = competitive advantage.

Dale Achabal – Intelligent Retailing

Achabal showed how data-driven decision-making transforms the entire value chain:

Pricing, assortment, promotions, and logistics must be guided by analytics.

Key Learning: Analytics = profitability.

Wells Fargo – Eskander Matta

With more than six million online banking customers in 2005, Wells Fargo was a prime example of early digital maturity. The company combined automated credit assessment, real-time alerts, and data-driven insights.

Key Learning: Integration increases loyalty—digital and physical channels reinforce each other.

Harrah’s Entertainment – CRM as a Competitive Advantage

Through its Total Rewards loyalty program, Harrah’s used predictive models to anticipate gaming behavior and tailor offers. The result: increased customer value, more visits, and measurable ROI.

Key Learning: Customer data as strategic capital.

Hilton – OnQ CRM

An early CRM system that brought all hotel experiences together in a single interface, used for personalization and loyalty management.

Sherwin-Williams – Brand Equity and Channel Strategy

Showed how brand equity can be measured as economic value, and how brand building is integrated into channel strategy.

IBM and Oracle

IBM emphasized the importance of “One View of the Customer,” while Oracle demonstrated how the right architecture enables scalable growth.

Reflections and Discussion

San Francisco 2005 showed that leadership, organization, and data analytics were critical—technology was merely an enabler. A culture of experimentation and a willingness to fail distinguished the American companies from their Norwegian counterparts.

International Perspectives

American companies thought globally from the outset. Norwegian participants gained insight into how the **Silicon Valley mindset—collaboration, risk-taking, and speed—**could be applied back home.

Watercolor illustration of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, with a laptop on a wooden table in the foreground, displaying the bridge on its screen. The illustration symbolizes the intersection of technology, digitalization, knowledge, and the physical world.

What Did We Take Home?

CRM must be a business strategy, not an IT project.
Customer insight is fuel for growth.
Seamless customer journeys build loyalty.
Data = decision-making power.

Relevance Today

Much of what was groundbreaking in 2005 is considered standard practice today. Yet many Norwegian organizations still struggle with seamless customer experiences, personalization, and KPIs that measure customer lifetime value.

San Francisco 2005 reminds us that digitalization is about people, culture, and continuous learning.

Peder Inge Furseth

Peder Inge Furseth was a key academic driving force behind the San Francisco seminars and played an important role in making the encounter with Silicon Valley relevant to Norwegian and European organizations. Through his role as a professor at BI Norwegian Business School and as academic director of the program, he helped participants place the presentations within a broader context—one in which technology, innovation, business development, and people had to be understood together.

In San Francisco, participants met entrepreneurs, researchers, technology leaders, and investors from some of the world’s most innovative environments. Furseth’s strength was his ability to connect these experiences with practical challenges and opportunities facing Norwegian organizations. He helped translate Silicon Valley’s ideas and ways of working into a

Nordic context where collaboration, trust, and long-term value creation play a central role.

Throughout the seminar series, he served as an important bridge between research, business, and technology. For many participants, he therefore became more than an academic leader—he was also a mentor who inspired them to think differently about innovation, digitalization, and commercialization.

Learn more about Peder Inge Furseth here

From Studies and Seminars to Today’s Knowledge Hub

The studies, seminars, and academic trips documented on this page form part of the knowledge base behind The Invisible Capital. Topics such as customers, technology, innovation, digitalization, and value creation have been part of this journey for several decades — while these fields have continued to evolve.

At The Invisible Capital, we continue exploring these questions through dedicated knowledge series. Here, earlier theory, research, and experience are connected with newer knowledge, emerging technologies, and today’s challenges facing people and organizations.

Innovation

Innovation is not just about new ideas. Value is created when knowledge, technology, and ideas are developed into products, services, processes, organizational forms, and business models that are actually put into use. The series on innovation traces the field from Schumpeter to modern innovation research and explores incremental, radical, disruptive, open, and user-driven innovation.

→ Explore the Innovation series

The Customer

The customer is not simply the recipient of what an organization produces. In a competitive market, the customer is a decisive factor in whether an organization actually succeeds in creating value. The series on the customer explores customer orientation, customer insight, customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty, trust, and the human interactions that shape the customer relationship.

→ Explore the Customer series

Value Creation

What does it really mean to create value — and who creates it? The Value Creation series moves from economic theory and influential thinkers to a broader understanding of how people, knowledge and skills, institutions, organizations, and the public sector contribute to value creation.

→ Explore the Value Creation series

Digitalization

Digitalization has evolved from individual technologies into a fundamental part of how organizations operate and create value. The Digitalization from A to Z series traces this evolution through the internet, the web, e-commerce, search, UX, social media, mobile, omnichannel, cloud, data, platforms, and digital transformation — leading up to today’s AI-first era.

→ Explore the Digitalization from A to Z series

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence represents the next chapter in the digital evolution. In our dedicated AI knowledge hub, we explore how artificial intelligence works, how AI finds and uses information, how it evaluates sources and websites, and what this development could mean for people, organizations, and value creation.

→ Explore the articles on Artificial Intelligence

Disrupting Class

Here, Christensen applies the theory of disruptive innovation to education and learning. The book describes how technology and digitalization can challenge traditional educational models and create new forms of learning and knowledge sharing.