Tag: strategy

  • Digital transformation strategies focus on reducing costs, upskilling – Highlights from Macroeconomic Outlook, Business Trends – ”Digital transformation focuses on employee productivity and automation. Nearly 44% of respondents either have a formal digital transformation strategy (32%) or are planning to develop one (11%). The primary drivers for adopting a digital transformation strategy are improving efficiency…

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  • Executive translation. – “Many high-agency managers try to prevent executives from doing silly things, but it’s almost always more effective to translate their energy for a silly thing into energy for a useful thing. It also leaves the executive feeling supported by your work rather than viewing you as an obstacle to their progress.”

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  • Why Is Demand Marketing An Obstacle To Its Own Success? – ‘Too many marketing subfunctions (demand/ABM, field marketing, customer marketing, digital, and events) create strategies unique to their function, independent from the others. Marketers often say that they have a “unified” plan, but it’s more like a PowerPoint deck with “chapters” for each team’s individual…

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  • How to blackmail your boss into adopting platform engineering, DevOps, agile, etc.

    How to blackmail your boss into adopting platform engineering, DevOps, agile, etc.

    This is a good talk listing some tactics for changing how organizations work. It’s targeted at executives. What’s bonkers is that, as the screenshot below, it has just 27 views. In the talk, we have a former group CIO at American Airlines. She’s telling you her tips for how to introduce change in a large…

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  • The Tanzu Platform – platform engineering in a box

    The Tanzu Platform – platform engineering in a box

    The Tanzu Platform – platform engineering in a box for private cloud This week, at my work, we launched the Tanzu Platform. This is both actual, new things and strategic tuning of many of our existing products. In brief, we’re focusing a lot more on private cloud PaaS now, and private cloud data services. (Sure,…

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  • Buy your platform, don’t build it

    Buy your platform, don’t build it

    When it comes to cloud native application platforms, we’re at an important evolutionary point: will the best practice for platform strategies be to build or to buy? Should you choose the components you need for a platform and integrate them together, or should you buy a pre-integrated platform? Unless you’re a handful of organizations, the…

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  • Commoditize your condiments, or, open source business models considered

    Commoditize your condiments, or, open source business models considered

    Business models are fascinating. Most business models come down to a type of arbitrage, at least as I understand it. You find something you have that you can sell to someone else, crucially, at a price above what it cost you to make that thing.1 In, let’s call it, The Capatalist Upbrining, there is a…

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  • Ex-technology companies. – “Organizations that spun up dedicated in-house build and deployment infrastructure have fixed engineering costs to maintain that infrastructure, and the math that convinced executives earlier–some sort of argument about the multiplicative effect on the impact of other engineers–doesn’t make as much sense anymore. But often you can’t just stop maintaining those investments,…

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  • How to write a business book proposal

    How to write a business book proposal

    I’ve written a few (little) business books, reviewed several, and reviewed several proposal for business books. Here’s what I think works well in proposals you’re sending to publishers: The publisher is in it to make money first, “important” content second. Your proposal is a business pitch, not an idea pitch. Make sure you talk about…

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  • Potato chips that taste like Thanksgiving stuffing – what could go wrong?

    Potato chips that taste like Thanksgiving stuffing – what could go wrong?

    Relative to your interests Cluetrain at 25 – This was an important book to me when it came out. It probably had a huge influence on my professional life. All these years later, I think it was right. The biggest evolution, unexpected, was that the Big Bad Corporate Octopus took it seriously and figured out…

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  • Type-writers are killing cursive, AMIRIGHT?

    There’s a lot going at work now, employee wise. If you’re using a VMware email address to subscribe to this (there’s several handfuls of people who are), I’d suggest switching it over to a personal email address. BEST OF LUCK TO US ALL. Meanwhile: Wastebook “Never ask me how I paid” is my version of…

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  • How Can CIOs Communicate the Business Value of IT? – Talk with biz-normals about how technology can make the organization better, not on the activities that’s required to do so: “IT demonstrates value when we enable business outcomes, not when we report effort expended, resources consumed or work done…. Highlight the impact technology can have…

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  • Everyone is Busy: Who Has Time to Transform? – Mark tries to crack the “how to engineer a corporate structure, plan, and incentive plan to actually change” problem of digital transformation. I think the answer is: make small goals that you do on a short (quarterly) basis instead giant, waterfall annual strategy plans. // “My…

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  • Making vision and strategy practical

    Making vision and strategy practical

    Suggested episode theme song. How are things going for you? Avoid using Vision and Strategy as an Executive Peace Out Here is something from an article I’m reviewing for a co-worker: It’s vital for any digital transformation to have a clear vision, purpose and a set of expected business outcomes. It lets everyone know what…

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  • It’s Time To Tell The Healthcare CX Story In Terms Of ROI – The focus is healthcare, here, but this applies to all industries: “Meeting with C-suiters and boards of directors, the disconnect is pretty clear. While CX pros (in many industries, not just healthcare) tend to talk about customer experience improvements in terms of…

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  • Porter’s Five Forces and the social web – There’s something interesting to do here in applying Porter to contemporary tech.

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  • The Quest for Better, Faster Deals – The highest quality deals are driven by strategy and vision needs at the buyer, the lowest by regulation needs and projects done by external consultants. I don’t know what “high quality deal” means, but it must be good. The conclusion: you want to sell to the business.

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  • 2023-05-31 day note

    2023-05-31 day note

    The day’s not over yet, but I’ve got two but things coming up the rest of the evening and will probably want to zone out after them: I’m hosting a fireside chat with Purnima Padmanabhan, the GM of our group at VMware (streamed in LinkedIn). She should be fun to talk with. And then I’ll…

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  • – Innovator’s Dilemma dynamics – “while a $40 million company needs to find just $8 million in revenues to grow at 20 percent in the subsequent year, a $4 billion company needs to find $800 million in new sales. No new markets are that large. As a consequence, the larger and more successful an organization…

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  • A Formula For Pitching CIOs – Pretty good for any pitch.

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