Disconnect To Reconnect
All journeys, no matter how fruitful, come to an end. After a little over nine and half years I decided to leave SAP last week. What a journey this has been! Making Design Thinking real I was hired into a multidisciplinary corporate strategy team, set up by Hasso Plattner, the chairman of SAP’s supervisory board, […]
The Art Of Delegation – My Ten Principles For Healthy Team Culture
“Delegate almost to the point of abdication” – Warren Buffet I have worked with numerous leaders at all levels and have seen the best and worst practices in how they delegate or they don’t. Here are my 10 principles of delegation that I practice and advocate based on the lessons I have learned by being […]
Inability Of Organizations To Manage "The Flow" Of Talent Management
The flow, a concept developed by one of my favorite psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, matches the popular performance versus potential matrix that many managers use to evaluate and calibrate their employees. For people to be in the flow they need to be somewhere in the middle moving diagonally up. Ideally, this is how employees should progress […]
Why And How Should You Hire A Chief Customer Success Officer?
For an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) it is everyone’s job to ensure customer success but it is no one person’s job. This is changing. I see more and more companies realizing this challenge and want to do something about it. Sales is interested in maintaining relationship with customers for revenue purposes and support works with […]
Focus On Abstraction And Not Complexity
I am a big fan of software design patterns. A design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context. Software design patterns are all about observing technical abstractions in complex problems by identifying patterns and applying well known solutions to them. My management style is largely based on […]
How I Accomplished My Personal Goal Of Going To Fewer Meetings
As part of my job I have to go to a lot of meetings. As it turns out, all meetings are not equally important. Many times, either during a meeting or after the meeting, I end up asking myself why the hell did I go to this meeting. Sounds familiar? A couple of yeas back, […]
Purple Squirrels
It is fashionable to talk about talent shortage in the silicon valley. People whine about how hard it is to find and hire the “right” candidates. What no one wants to talk about is how the hiring process is completely broken. I need to fill headcount: This is a line that you hear a lot […]
My Top 3 Tips On How to Help Your Team Succeed if You Are Acquired
We recently passed the 2 year anniversary of our acquisition by Adobe. I’ve learned a lot that I want to cover later, but one question I was recently asked was what can do in an acquisition as a founder to help manage your team to success. I was not a perfect executive after our acquisition. […]
Celebrating Failures
Being a passionate design thinker I am a big believer in failing fast and failing often. I have taken this one step further; I celebrate one failure every week. Here’s why: You get more comfortable looking for failures, analyzing them, and learn from it I have sat through numerous post-mortem workshops and concluded that the […]
Lead, Follow, Or Get Out Of The Way
If you have been following this blog you would know that I mainly blog about enterprise software, cloud, and big data with a few occasional posts on design and design thinking. That’s what I am most passionate about. Having spent my entire career building enterprise software I have realized that success and competitive differentiation in […]
Marissa Mayer and Yahoo’s telecommuting policy: Right motivation, wrong execution
When Yahoo! hired Marissa Mayer, I supported the move, believing that the board needed to shake things up, and that given the dismal state of the business, Mayer was probably a better candidate than they could ever have expected to attract. I also supported the move on Mayer’s part; she wasn’t ever going to become […]
Maybe It’s More Important Your Co-Founders’ Weaknesses are Complementary To Yours
I think in the enterprise, in SaaS, it’s especially important you pick the right co-founders. It’s a 7-10 year journey, after all. In Consumer Internet, I guess so long as you hit it early, you can always get rid of Eduardo (as expensive as that may be), kick out the Sean Parkers, bring in the […]
Why TwentyFeet is Total Twash
Yet another Twitter analytic tool has made it into the spotlights: Twentyfeet
Like most if not all other tools that try to measure Twitter stats (Klout, Tweetlevel), it horribly fails. Apparently it’s too much work or money to actually measure all…
Entrepreneur’s Don’t Think Enough. Here’s What You Can Do About It …
Every so often I find myself caught up in a really hectic 3-4 week schedule where it seems like I float endlessly betweens meetings. Pitches. Intros. Board Meetings. Conferences. And I get flooded with legal docs, end-of-quarter financial administration, recruiting, whatever. I get sucked up in “Do” mode. Startups Are for Doers Now, I’m pretty […]
Big Brother? Sits right on your mobile
[The image above has nothing to do with this post, but it seemed to be fitting, given the latest developments. This post is all about trust] In this age of free(mium), it’s common knowledge that you pay with your privacy. Facebook is the best (or should I say worst) example of the dance around your […]
