Category: Innovation and Reinvention

In business school, we learned that companies need to develop sustainable competitive advantages. To build value for the long term, you needed to develop distinct competencies that your competitors would not be able to imitate, and then find a way to apply them as an advantage in the markets in which you compete. For some […]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke

It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results. —Walter Bagehot The Project Management Office: From Technology Spectator to Enterprise Enabler A topic which several customers have raised is the role of Project Management Offices (PMOs) in agile organisations. The question is normally about the PMO’s relevance in the […]

Managers don’t solve simple, isolated problems; they manage messes. -Russell L. Ackoff By education and hobbies, I am an electronics engineer. Most problems I face in this domain can be solved through the application of mathematical principles and known solutions. Complex problems can be decomposed into multiple simpler problems and solved in the same way, […]

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 […]

One of the challenges many enterprise leaders face is how to experiment and quickly create business value from machine learning without establishing large teams with specialized skillsets and infrastructure. As a CTO, I found that having access to Amazon Web Service’s pre-trained AI Services enabled our developers, even those with no prior machine leaning experience, […]

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 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 […]

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, […]

Organizations which design systems…are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — M. Conway In a previous post, I covered what microservices are and their benefits. My aim was to help non-technical executives understand what microservices are and the role they play in supporting business objectives. Implemented correctly, a microservices architecture […]