Tag: Leadership

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more. —Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman of Amazon Traditional organizations focus on optimizing efficiency, trying to specialize and maximize the use […]

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. —Tim Harford, Economist Read any contemporary article on organisations and within the first few sentences the word, “agile” appears at least once. Some articles suggest achieving agility with a new target operating model (TOM), […]

Transformation is not a destination; it’s a journey of continuous growth and self-discovery. —Tony Robbins I used to run regularly until life got in the way. I now intend to spend a boatload of money on fitness gear and fit running around all my other activities, probably starting in the new year. I anticipate being […]

Some of us like to use the holiday season and early part of the new year to step back from day-to-day activities and reflect. It’s a good time to plan a bit for the coming year and catch up on what others are doing and thinking. For me it’s also a chance to work my […]

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 […]

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 […]

In the digital world, formerly discrete activities have become continuous. In the old world of IT, software deliveries were considered discrete events. We created projects to deliver software capabilities, set requirements for them, deployed code, and then moved on to the next project. At least that was the theory. We knew those IT systems would […]

Sometimes an idea becomes so ingrained in conventional wisdom, such an embedded assumption in everything we do, that it demands to be questioned. Think about how often you hear someone in a meeting say, “We need to prioritize,” or ask, “Is this a priority?” When something goes wrong, it may be blamed on a failure […]

“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 […]

Given today’s economic uncertainties, many companies are focused on ways to reduce—or at least control—their costs. Their approaches are often based on the traditional idea of controlling costs through the mechanism of budgets. “Let’s find places to cut a budget and force the manager working with that budget to find savings.” Often, the easiest areas […]