AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Tag: Change Leadership
2023 Year-End Blog Roundup
Happy holidays to everyone! During this time, I like to look back on the year in AWS Enterprise Strategy Blog posts to see what themes have emerged. This blog addresses the concerns and challenges voiced by executives during the Enterprise Strategy team’s approximately 1,500 annual meetings with AWS customers. Reflecting on these important topics reveals […]
What Are Three Things You Need to Do to Foster a Data-Driven Culture?
According to the worldwide bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, people make decisions either intuitively or logically. Intuition leads to fast decisions; rational thinking leads to slow decisions. In organizations, it’s the other way around. Intuition leads to long decision-making processes; data- and fact-driven decisions lead to shorter processes. In […]
Responsible AI Best Practices: Promoting Responsible and Trustworthy AI Systems
The emergence of generative AI has brought about transformative possibilities and the potential to benefit how we work, live, and interact with the world. However, it is crucial to recognize the responsibility that comes with such powerful technology. When I speak to executives today, there is a lot of enthusiasm and excitement to get started […]
A Culture of Resilience
There’s something problematic about planning for resilience. On the one hand, we know it’s necessary. If the COVID pandemic taught us nothing else, we learned that unexpected major disruptions can and will occur. And those disruptions will involve not just technology but, in some cases, business processes, personnel, communication, and even the fundamental market characteristics […]
Tenets: supercharging decision-making
“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist & philosopher Thinking is hard; energy intensive even. Perhaps that’s the reason we obsess about food. One estimate indicates we make over 200 food-related decisions a day. Another popular internet statistic boldly states that the average human makes […]
CTO: The Evolving Role of the Chief Trade-Off Officer
“Stop trying to make everyone happy. You’re not chocolate” – Anon As a distant observer of the art of being a DJ, I believe I can make their jobs easier. My cunning plan is to replace all those complex sliders on their mixing decks with binary switches. Volume: yes or no? Bass: on or off? […]
Managing in Economic Uncertainty: Cost Reductions
Managing in times of economic uncertainty means facing difficult choices. Reducing costs is a choice that leaders often face but mostly dread. Many of us on the Enterprise Strategy team have faced multiple macroeconomic headwinds or other industry- and company-specific challenges in our previous roles as CXOs. In this post, I outline some of the […]
Digital Transformation: the Why, Who, How, and What – Part 4, “The What”
In part three, ‘The How’ blog post, we covered best practices for transformational processes, and how you can use the digital-transformation process framework to deliver an effective transformation. In this blog post, we dive deeper into the technologies that enable digital transformation. Contemporary Technology Requirements The rising expectations of customers and employees, due to the […]
Digital Transformation: The Why, Who, How, and What – Part 3, “The How”
In part one, ‘The Why’ blog post, we discussed why digital transformation is needed for organizations, followed up by part two, ‘The Who’, which covered how successful organizations are rethinking their approach to organizational structure, learning, innovation, and culture. In this blog post, we dive deeper into the process of digital transformation. Contemporary Process Requirements […]
Digital Transformation: The Why, Who, How, and What – Part 2, “The Who”
Although still challenging and important, technology is often the easier part of digital transformation. As it turns out, the people part is the most critical and is often overlooked and under-appreciated. In an earlier blog post—‘The Why’—we discussed the goal of digital transformation and several critical attributes successful digitally-transformed organizations have in common. Many of […]