AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Category: Culture and Training
The Agile Organisation: Changing our Worldview
It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change. —Charles Darwin From childhood, our amazing brain trains itself to recognise patterns. We use this capability to accelerate decision-making, saving us addressing every problem as if new. To apply patterns we ingest, filter, and interpret data using […]
Blog Wrap-Up 2019
Sorry, everyone—I know it’s a bit late to be posting a summary of last year’s content. It’s been a busy start to the year, meeting with customers in the US and Canada. In any case, here’s a summary of 2019’s enterprise strategy content that might help you find content that’s most useful to you. Much […]
Mental Models for Your Digital Transformation
Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior. – Peter Senge As leaders, we are responsible for making decisions in the […]
Best of Both Worlds: Building an Entrepreneurial Culture in the Enterprise
In our Executive Summit roundtable session at re:Invent 2019, Phil Potloff and I discussed the topic of innovation in large enterprises with executives spanning many industries and public sector organisations. Much has been written about how large companies often lose elements of their original DNA as they grow, including their aptitude to innovate. Given this, […]
Drive Change but Avoid the Chasms
Every change will be met with an equal, opposite, unpredictable change of its own. —Inspired by Isaac Newton In “Today’s CIO—Orchestrator in Chief,” we covered how changes can be introduced into organisations, but only eluded to matching different approaches with different audiences. This approach is similar to how marketers segment customers to target different buying […]
Letting Go: Enabling Autonomy in Teams
My detailed project plan won the war. — said no military commander, ever. In the chaos of battle, it is accepted military doctrine that highly centralised decision-making fails. Information cannot be rapidly assimilated from the front line and turned into timely decisions. To address this, a commander’s intent is communicated, guiding each platoon in their […]
Digitally Transforming What Exactly?
If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it. Albert Einstein I’ve been asked multiple times recently what “digital transformation” means? Given that by 2023 conservative estimates of annual expenditure on digital transformations are north of $2 trillion but with well […]
Failing & Creating a Culture of Learning
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A customer recently asked me how we introduced the concept of “failing forward” at Cox Automotive. It is a change many enterprises are […]
Learning to Learn: The Continuous Cultural Change Competency
“A learning organisation is an organisation that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.” Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline There is something excitingly headline worthy about big initiatives. There is also something depressingly familiar about their poor success rates. In Continuous Transformation: Stop Stopping Mark Schwartz stated that “…your digital transformation must prepare […]
Today’s CIO—Orchestrator in Chief Part 2
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together” Vincent Van Gogh In my previous blog I outlined the role of the CIO in driving organisational change, and the first steps to be taken to build the case for change and a supporting coalition. In this post, I will dive into how […]