AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Tag: Leadership
The CPO-CIO Partnership Part 3: You get what you reward
“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” — From the Agile Manifesto Since my blog post on the Chief People Officer (CPO) and CIO partnership, a new urgency has emerged—popularly named the “great resignation”—triggered by a demand for skills, a search […]
Learners lead, leaders learn: The case for technology fluency in the C-Suite
“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.” —Brian Herbert, Author It’s easy to think of life as linear stages. Where did you go to school? What do you do for a living? What are your retirement plans? These stages are interspersed […]
The CDO: Chief Disappearing Officer
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams I have been privileged to meet executives from every sector, many with the newer title of “CDO.” The “D” usually stands for Digital or Data. Here’s my observation from seeing great CDOs in […]
Enterprise Strategy Blog 2021: Year-End Roundup
Overview Throughout the year, we write blog posts on whatever topics seem to be most important to the AWS customer executives we speak to. Each of us on the Enterprise Strategy team holds 100-200 customer meetings a year, generally at the most senior executive levels, to try to help with their challenges in digital transformation—cultural […]
CxO Insight: Reporting Cybersecurity to the Board
by Clarke Rodgers, Enterprise Strategist, AWS Enterprise Strategy Over the last several months, one of the most common discussions I have had with members of the C-Suite is around how to effectively report and/or discuss cybersecurity with the organization’s Board of Directors (BoD) and/or Senior Leadership Team (SLT). Background Before I get into the details, […]
Outsourcing in the Age of Agile: Keys to Success
Tom Godden and Phil Le-Brun In our previous blog post, we discussed why we need to rethink how we outsource in the age of Agile. The problems are clear, but how do we overcome them? In this post, we’ll get into some practical keys to success and obstacles to avoid in order to be successful. […]
Outsourcing in the Age of Agile: Call to Action
Tom Godden and Phil Le-Brun Where does passion and innovation come from in your organization? From the top? From a particular department or individual? From a supplier? We would hazard a guess that it’s probably not the latter—so why do many companies’ investments imply otherwise? We believe there is an opportunity to reassess how outsourcing […]
The CISO Perspective: How Chief Information Security Officers “Cross the River” to Cloud Adoption
In this guest post, Mignona Cote, the AWS Global Security Advisory lead, reports on her conversation with Jim Routh, Head of Enterprise Cybersecurity at MassMutual. Their discussion covers the challenges for CISOs who straddle the worlds of traditional information security and newer, digital. DevSecOps and cloud-based security paradigms. Ultimately, Routh says, CISOs must learn to […]
The Management Trap: Time for a Rethink
To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for. —Edwards Deming We have a problem. Proclamations about the cloud, agility, and digital transformation hide the growing gap between the speed of the outside world and the speed inside organisations. My colleague Gregor Hohpe […]
Guts, Part Four: Sunk Costs and Divesting
If you’ve been doing something for a while, and now you change course, is that an admission that the way you were doing it before was a mistake? If you’ve spent a lot on something, should you toss it out when something better comes along? If your budget is full of “keeping the lights on” […]