Some Thoughts on Leadership Going into 2016
Having time to think about “leadership” at most startups feels like a luxury. It feels like something you could turn your attention to once you have tens of millions of dollars and a large staff to run operations and you could step back from it all and think about how to lead. The reality of […]
Don’t Fear Business Process Change. It’s (Usually) a Good Thing.
Recently I was having a discussion, not quite a debate, but a discourse with an extremely smart VC — far smarter than me — who was relatively new to SaaS, having spent more time in B2C. Like a lot of folks tip-toeing from B2C to SaaS, his first stop was in freemium. He was obsessed with […]
Personal disruption: Practical advice for corporate innovation, transformation, and leadership
Before writing her most recent book, titled Disrupt Yourself, author Whitney Johnson was a business partner with superstar thinker Clayton Christensen, who pioneered the concept of disruptive and sustaining innovation. In the book, Johnson urges readers to apply Christensen’s principles of disruptive innovation to their professional career. She believes that applying these principles to oneself […]
CIO survival skills: Digital mindset and the impact on IT
Historically, IT departments consisted of large computers, located in air conditioned facilities, requiring specialized expertise to run, program, and maintain. Given the complexity, cost, and difficulty of using these early computers, IT staff were the high priests and business users did not have direct access to the machines. In 1967, computer architect Robert S. Barton […]
How to Know if You Have ADD and What to Do About It
Let me start the post with three statements 1. I have attention deficit disorder, it is a real condition, I have been diagnosed including having radioactive isotopes through my brain to map my development and yet I’m a leader, I have accomplished much, I did well in school and went on to earn a master’s degree […]
HR Millennial report: ‘We want transparency, honesty, and opportunity’
We often hear discussions about Millennials in the workplace. This generation, consisting of people born roughly between 1980 and 2000, will play an increasingly important role in the knowledge economy. The image shows how large the Millennial group is in comparison to other generations. To learn more about how Millennials view the work environment, I […]
16 metrics for tracking Collaborative Innovation performance
In a recent PwC survey, 61% of CEOs said innovation was a key priority for their company (pdf). The only surprising result there is that it wasn’t 100%. Innovation efforts come in a variety of forms: innovation and design labs, jobs-to-be-done analysis, corporate venturing, distributed employee experiments, open innovation, TRIZ, etc. In this post, I […]
When things go wrong
In technology, as in so much else, things go wrong all the time. Web sites go down, companies lose your data, and more. We all know this and – to greater or lesser degrees – broadly accept that it will eventually happen to us. The real trick, often, isn’t to prevent everything going wrong but to […]
Avoiding innovation errors through jobs-to-be-done analysis
The lean startup movement was developed to address an issue that bedeviled many entrepreneurs: how to introduce something new without blowing all your capital and time on the wrong offering. The premise is that someone has a vision for a new thing, and needs to iteratively test that vision (“fail fast”) to find product-market fit. It’s been […]
McKinsey explains machine learning to execs
McKinsey explains machine learning to execs: Machine Learning is part of a broader conversation around Artificial Intelligence and related themes, which has recently begun to (re-)emerge from the labs and enter mainstream technology conversations. The terms are horribly abused, and mostly badly misunderstood, but there is clearly something afoot. And with good reason. These tools […]
Taylor Swift & L’affaire Apple In The Digital Universe
As known for quite sometime, Apple is working to get its new streaming music service, Connect, up and running. It followed what is generally taken as the standard way of launching things: offer the service free for the first three months. But, Apple then made a decision that quickly showed itself as short-sighted. Apple also […]
Do Less. More.
We are experiencing a frenetic time. I rarely talk to any startup entrepreneur or VC who doesn’t feel it and somehow long for simpler times despite the benefits we all enjoy from increased enthusiasm for our sector. For entrepreneurs there’s too much money sloshing around. One would think entrepreneurs would never want less available cash – […]
On Leadership. And Diversity of Character.
* What does it mean to be a leader? It’s relatively easier to answer that question when you’re a founder & CEO and have total control over hiring & firing. If your company is successful and valuable people generally do what you ask. It can sometimes create confusion about whether or not you’re truly a great […]
Some Thoughts on Twitter as a Micro-Blogging Tool
1/ Twitter started off positioned as a micro-blogging platform but in the end became more of an RSS reader — Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015 2/ @pmarca popularized the “Tweetstorm” which ironically brought the real concept of microblogging to Twitter many years after its inception — Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015 3/ What […]
Digital transformation can save the CIO
As cloud computing grows, many CIOs are concerned about technology budgets shifting away from IT and into other corporate functions such as marketing and finance. These concerns are realistic because, in truth, as business people become more technology savvy, their independence and desire for control increases. However, these sentiments mask a dynamic that should give […]
