Category: Enterprise Strategy

In my last post I talked about the need for leaders to have guts—in the sense of being willing to make decisions under uncertainty once they’ve gathered enough information. But that’s not the end of the story. In this post I want to talk about gutsy management of vendor relations. In the next post I’ll […]

As a previous customer and current enterprise strategist for Amazon Web Services (AWS), I’ve seen that although no two companies are the same, IT challenges are extremely similar across the industry spectrums. One of those challenges I faced in my past roles was the sheer amount of time, cost, and frustration of managing database software […]

As we’ve all realized by now, the term digital transformation has become slippery and overused. Something big is going on today in the way technology is used in large enterprises, a change that seems to have something to do with digital technology, digital ways of working, and the increasing importance of digital interactions in our […]

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. ― Ernest Hemingway At a discussion on the characteristics of modern agile organisations, a chief people officer asked how psychological safety could be created in the workplace. In the moment an answer eluded me. The topic came up again as […]

The important lesson to learn from COVID-19 is not that we need to be prepared for pandemics: it’s that we need to be prepared for unexpected, high-impact events, whatever they may be. Any particular one of these events is too unlikely to plan for, but taken collectively, there’s a reasonable chance that one of them […]

Machine Learning (ML) is such a powerful new set of technologies, opening up so many business possibilities, that it’s sometimes difficult to imagine how best to put it to use. The possibilities are overwhelming, and there is little history to build on. In this post Baran Karlidag ties ML to the specific challenges that financial […]

Like other industries, insurance must respond to rising customer expectations for digital interactions. In this post, Tony Jacob, Amazon Web Services’ Worldwide Insurance Business Development Manager, explains how insurers can deepen their relationships with customers by engaging them digitally. Interestingly, he finds that the challenges have less to do with the digital interactions themselves, and […]

Your cloud migration was off to a good start: you set out with a clear plan, used the “Six Rs” to segment your workloads by the different strategies of moving to the cloud, and have closely tracked core metrics like number of applications migrated. However, your stakeholders have become increasingly doubtful as to whether the […]

Can I speak frankly? Leadership requires guts. There comes a time when a leader has enough information and has mitigated enough risks to move forward with any urgent decision. That’s the moment when the leader must proceed boldly and inspire the rest of the organization to act.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher