AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

Tag: Cultural Change

Top-Down Transformation: Shu-Ha-Ri to Go Beyond Command-and-Control

In a previous blog post, I talked about how to drive top-down change in an enterprise, and how to take advantage of command-and-control authority even in an Agile setting. In this post, I’ll talk about a particular technique that draws on authority. It is the change management approach called “Shu-ha-ri,” a concept drawn from the […]

Driving Change from the Top Down: Wielding Organizational Power

When it comes to digital transformation, every enterprise is different. There is often a change agent (or a set of change agents) with a vision, a knowledge of good practices, a sense of urgency, and the energy to battle impediments. The change agent(s) may be anywhere in the organizational structure: high, low, or—in a typical […]

Getting Started with Training for the Cloud

Enterprise executives contemplating a move to the cloud sometimes worry that their current employees will not be up to the job. After all, the cloud involves a rather different set of practices and technologies, and making the most of the cloud through DevOps, infrastructure as code, automated security and compliance guardrails, and so on requires […]

The Devolution of IT: How SGN, A Major Utility Provider in Europe, is Modernizing IT Using the Cloud

©Anna-Maria Oléhn https://www.flickr.com/photos/agrajag42/5044627532/ Many people believe that decentralization means loss of control. That’s simply not true. You can improve control if you look at control as the control of events and not people. –Wilbur Creech In my role as Head of Enterprise Strategy for Amazon Web Services (AWS), I’m very fortunate to have the opportunity to […]

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: Friedkin’s Journey Toward XOIT & High-Multiple Cultures

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

“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 […]