Category: Innovation and Reinvention

One of the things that I enjoy most about Amazon’s culture is that Customer Obsession is our first leadership principle. I was a customer for 26 years in my various roles at The Coca-Cola Company and benefited from Amazon’s customer obsession. What I found is this often comes down to creating, and constantly making better, […]

We hear a lot of talk these days about digital transformation. Enterprises see that they need to take advantage of new digital technologies and management techniques to become nimbler and to deepen their relationships with customers. Their technology now looks antiquated compared to the digital services they use every day; their processes seem slow compared […]

Sometimes I think IT leaders are missing a key point in the way they speak to their non-technology counterparts. Case in point: we keep saying things like, “The company has to be more comfortable taking risks,” or “We have to fail fast,” or “We need to be less risk-averse.” I can guarantee that none of […]

by Sid Arora, Sr. Product Manager, AWS Managed Services and Vieng Soukhavong, Global Head of Operations for AWS Managed Services introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist Our Amazon Managed Services (AMS) group operates customer workloads in the cloud. It has learned a great deal from doing so and has devised innovative solutions for achieving high levels of reliability […]

The roles of the CFO and CIO have been subtly changing. In many enterprises, these roles had veered away from the strategic focus that one would expect from CXOs. But to succeed in the digital world, as I discuss in my book War & Peace & IT, enterprises must let their CIOs and CFOs re-establish […]

In my previous post I talked about the presumed challenge of the “frozen middle”—the middle managers who seem to resist transformation even when both the leaders of the organization and the hands-on executors want to see it happen. In that post I discussed the changing role of middle management and the critical role middle managers […]

There’s a disturbing trend in business today of shorter and shorter company lifespans: the average tenure of an S&P company today is a mere 15 years, compared to 67 years in the 1920s.1 Moreover, in the last 20 years the number of domestic companies on the US Stock Exchange has dropped by half.2 While there are a […]

First in a two-part series In many of our conversations with customers, we hear talk of a “frozen middle”—middle managers in IT who are reluctant to change and either block or slow down attempts at transformation. The idea is that senior leadership wants to gain the benefits of the cloud and digital transformation while line […]

A frequent topic in our conversations with enterprise leaders is just how difficult it is to find people with the right skills for the digital age. We often suggest that their go-to-strategy should be to grow talent internally, developing the skills of people they already employ (an earlier blog post covers this subject as well). But […]

In this new episode of Ahead in the Cloud, we hear from Don Weinstein, the Corporate Vice President for Global Product and Technology at ADP. Interestingly, by the nature of his business, Don is able to see workplace trends not only in his organization but in those of ADP’s many customers. I’m sure you’ll enjoy […]