Category: Enterprise Strategy*

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” — Benjamin Franklin In 2014, while VP of Technology at Experian, I put together a small team to rebuild our B2C platform in the cloud. We were immediately confronted with a major obstacle — we lacked the skills and experience to develop solutions in […]

Driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake is likely to get you nowhere, but certainly will burn out vital parts of your car. -Terry Savage I’ve recently published several series detailing some of the patterns we’ve seen around large-scale IT transformation and cloud migrations. In 2014, I talked about “analysis […]

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator. -Francis Bacon Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with hundreds of thought-leading executives who are leading large-scale cultural shifts in their organizations. Few have done this better than Capital One, who has built a […]

Earlier this week I kicked off a series on Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, and have been pleasantly surprised by the engagement it’s generated (particularly via comments/likes on LinkedIn) so far. Turns out, cultural transformation is a popular topic, and there seems to be a strong appetite for more stories on this topic. I have […]

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — Peter Drucker I was recently involved in a discussion with a group of CTOs around the concept of 10x developers. This concept suggests that a rockstar developer is an order of magnitude more productive than an average developer. I’ve worked with thousands of developers in my career, and, while I agree that […]

“Tenet: a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; especially: one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession.”– Merriam-Webster Making a large-scale transition to the cloud means that many development, operations, and security processes are no longer applicable — or, they’re dramatically altered in the cloud. For example, AWS provides programmatic […]

“Life is a journey. When we stop, things don’t go right.” -Pope Francis My recent post “Don’t Let Traditional Managed Services Providers Hold You Back” illustrated how shifts in technology paradigms have made it hard for some traditional managed services providers to keep pace. I feel very fortunate to have had several customers and partners reach […]

“You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” — Andre Gide It’s hard for large organizations to keep up with the pace of technology evolution, and I’ve come to admire those who have repeatedly proven that they’re strong enough to survive. Companies like GE, Capital One, News Corp, and Netflix […]

“There is always tension between the possibilities we aspire to and our wounded memories and past mistakes.” — Sean Brady I talk to a lot of executives who are debating different migration approaches for the applications in their IT portfolio. While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, we spend a good deal of time building migration plans […]

“The only thing that is constant is change.” — Heraclitus Most executives that I talk to tell me that their journey to the cloud is more about business and cultural transformation than it is about technology adoption. To that end, I’ve been writing a series on a mental model that I call the Stages of Adoption, which […]