By David Pinto
If this is truly the Age of the Woman in business, few people more perfectly fit that label than Deborah Weinswig.
To paraphrase that tired bromide, to those among you who know Weinswig, no explanation is necessary; to those who don’t no explanation is possible.
To briefly describe her, Weinswig heads an organization named, appropriately, Coresight Research. To explain what exactly it is that Coresight Research does is a tad more difficult. To put it in simplest terms, the company Weinswig leads brings buyers and sellers together, regardless of what they’re buying and selling.
Coresight does this in many ways, all of which revolve around Weinswig’s intelligence, knowledge, creativity, ambition, energy and perseverance. But the primary vehicle through which the company does this is research, mostly original. It’s no exaggeration to state that Coresight as an organization, and Weinswig as its leader, know more about the impact of finance on the business of doing business than any similar organization currently involved in the business community.
Equally impressive, Coresight has succeeded, in its decade of doing business, by recruiting and involving major companies in showcasing its research — and requesting, in return, that they help finance those findings.
The most recent example of this relationship was a daylong event, in late June, convened at the IBM headquarters in lower Manhattan, with IBM serving as a very willing collaborator.
The event was aptly titled “The Retail Power Grid: Aligning Channels, Customers and Coalitions Where People Power Meets Policy, Purpose and Progress.”
Rather than attempt to explain this cumbersome title, it’s best to describe the meeting itself. In its broadest terms it consisted of a series of about eight half-hour panel discussions staffed and moderated by people who can legitimately be called authorities on their various subjects.
The subject matter was loosely tied to the concept of AI and its impact, current and future, on the retail community. In fact, the issue it sought to examine, mostly successfully, was the future, what it will mean and what it could mean for the companies and the roughly 150 senior managers in attendance.
These discussions were bookended by various analysis and keynote summaries that sought, mostly successfully, to translate the various points made by the various panels into actionable conclusions. Needless to add, Weinswig was the major participant in these analyses.
This ode to Weinswig and her company could go on indefinitely. But the point here is that some exciting things are happening in the business areas of research, analysis, and the generation and sharing of valuable information designed to educate and improve the prospects of the people and organizations exposed to it. And it is innovators such as Deborah Weinswig, and 21st century organizations such as Coresight Research that have made this valuable addition to the business community … well … valuable.
