
Consultant-Led Innovation
Finally, remember Innovation won’t come from plans or people outside your company – it will be found in the people you already have inside who understand your company’s strengths and its vulnerabilities. Steve Blank, Esade Business School Commencement Speech I think Steve Blank – well-respected thinker on innovation and entrepreneurship – has hit a key point […]

Enterprise software marketing: Sell the value, not the box
Many enterprise software startups view success as a simple equation: build a great product and the world will line up to buy. There are two problems with this logic. First, it assumes that great product always drives great success; and second, this thinking leads to feature-oriented, rather than customer-centric, decisions. The tendency to focus on features […]

Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
This past October I was honored to be invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company” but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy” since my goal was to slay many of the […]

This Week’s Keynote Presentations
I have often complained how much I hate sitting on panels. The reason is that conferences usually pack them up with speakers to maximize the number of high profile guests in attendance to sell more general admission tickets. So with a panel of 5-6 people and 30-45 minutes it’s hard to have a real conversation. […]