Tag: strategy
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Discussing the common “CIO agenda”
I get asked to talk with “executives” more and more. That’s part of why Pivotal moved me over to Europe. People make lots of claims about what executives want to hear, the conversations you can have with them as a vendor. They don’t have time. You have have to be concise. They don’t want to…
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Link: One Simple Way to Eliminate Distractions in a Board Meeting
The best board meetings are discussions and debates about the business yet many executive teams spent their time wanting to walk through hours of slides on how great they’re doing. Humans do much better when they’re participating than when they’re being lectured to. The most value you’ll get out of your board is when they’re…
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🗂 Speak up more
> If you’re authentic and fully invested in making an impact while enhancing the experience of those around you, then you strengthen your case. Conversely, if you’re inauthentic or let yourself be silenced in the moments that matter, your case weakens every time you withdraw. www.strategy-business.com/blog/Good…
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🗂 Meanwhile, does tumblr just burn cash?
> The reality is that Tumblr is almost certainly a big money loser: the app was earning about $13 million in revenue on expenses of about $25 million when Yahoo acquired the blogging platform/social network in 2013, and while that is not necessarily reflective of how much the service might generate today (although it probably…
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Link: The Demise of Blockbuster, and Other Failure Fairy Tales
Strategy is hard, execution at the middle-management later is harder. What’s missing from the story is that PARC delivered on its mission. In fact, it saved Xerox from the fate of Kodak. While its copier business was disrupted by smaller Japanese competitors like Canon and Ricoh, one component of the Star system, the laser printer,…
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Link: High churn rate in the S&P 500
Innosight’s third study of company’s ability to maintain leadership positions estimates that by 2018, 50% of the companies on the S&P 500 will drop off, replaced by competitors and new market entrants. Staying at the top of your market-heap is getting harder and harder. This is often used to show how difficult the business world…
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Link: Impressions from VMworld
“VMware’s ability to strategically partner to respond to shifting market forces is an impressive competency that should not be underestimated.” Original source: Impressions from VMworld
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Link: Project management vs. product management
‘That discussion starts with a very concise and useful distinction between project management (the world the government knows) and product management (the world it doesn’t). Project management, they write, is “focused on managing to a plan” – such as managing schedule, budget, risk, policy compliance and then reporting status to stakeholders. “Success for a project…
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Link: Defense Innovation Board unveils ‘Ten Commandments of Software’
“It seems to me that in our meetings so far we’ve seen many many helper-types — supporters, planners, document writers, and so forth,” he went on. “But it’s a very rare event when we have a meeting with what I would consider to be programmers. One of my most fun questions is to sit in…
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Link: We need to talk about organizational change management
“Treat them with the same respect and reverence and results will follow. Treat them as a resource that needs managing like spare parts that can be replaced, and you’ll fail.” Original source: We need to talk about organizational change management
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Link: Do you need a corporate vision in government IT?
“In an organisation like a local authority this is especially tough as they are such disparate entities. Think about it, in what strange universe does it make sense for a single organisation to collect taxes, deliver social care, pick up bins and operate transport? None of these and many of the other services councils deliver…
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Link: Q&A on the Book Enterprise Agility
“Getting feedback on the effectiveness of the initiatives, and acting on it quickly to refine the strategies and initiatives to ensure their alignment with the purpose is critical for sustaining the effectiveness of the organization towards fulfilling the purpose.” Original source: Q&A on the Book Enterprise Agility
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Link: Agile Strategy: Short-Cycle Strategy Development and Execution
Kind of a good list of how to align short, agile cycles to longer, strategic planning. Key, I think, is understanding the stability and predictably needs of strategic planning and explaining how short agile loops increase the confidence the corporate can have in both it’s plans and better intelligence about the market and what works.…
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Link: Employees should work on hard things, not easy things
‘For a business to thrive, each employee must ultimately be worth three times their wages to the business. That means if someone is getting paid $60k per year, their worth to the business likely exceeds $180k. People often underestimate what they are worth. One way people, especially more junior employees, underestimate themselves is by failing…
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Link: Stop Playing Devil’s Advocate, and Other Advice for Better Decision Making
I think the idea is, they know the devil’s advocate is a game, so they don’t take it seriously enough to be useful: “When someone truly believes something different than you do, it has a stimulating quality for your own thinking. When you’re roleplaying, you can’t argue with the person who’s pretending, if you will.…
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Link: What is “digital”?
“I tend to (rather crudely) break down what digital transformation could mean into three broad categories: (1) Digital access – taking a paper or telephone based process and whacking it online with an e-form (quick to do, few benefits except a bit of convenience for web savvy users); (2) Digital efficiency – taking that process…
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Link: The New CIO: Leading IT the Mark Schwartz Way
“As the company decides on its objectives and turns them into a definition of business value, the CIO takes this vision and works with the teams to implement these objectives thereby connecting the team to the goal and giving constant feedback on progress. The CIO is the enterprise architect and arbitrates the quality of the…
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Link: How to make innovation programs deliver more than coffee cups
‘“a lack of connection between innovation teams and their parent organization. Teams form/and are taught outside of their parent organization because innovation is disconnected from other activities. This meant that when teams went back to their home organization, they found that execution of existing priorities took precedence. They returned speaking a foreign language (What’s a…
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Link: What Your Innovation Process Should Look Like
“Once a list of innovation ideas has been refined by curation, it needs to be prioritized. One of the quickest ways to sort innovation ideas is to use the McKinsey Three Horizons Model. Horizon 1 ideas provide continuous innovation to a company’s existing business model and core capabilities. Horizon 2 ideas extend a company’s existing…
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Link: Revenge of the PMO
‘But it’s just a marketing strategy. Mostly they just redefine the meaning of these terms to obscure their purposes. An Epic becomes a “mini business case;” the concept of governance sounds less onerous when called “lean governance;” and program management might cause less angst when positioned as “agile program management.” The constant talk of iterations…