Tag: Reinvention

“I never lose. I either win or I learn” Nelson Mandela A phrase that I find is not resonating well with enterprise executives is “fail fast.” Despite the best attempts to justify this exhortation, executives at an airline, financial, or restaurant company are clearly not going to embrace accepting a philosophy where the wrong type of […]

Although new to AWS, I am already hearing similar stories from enterprise customers regarding their challenges as they look to proactively grow and even disrupt their own businesses. While our AWS customers are interested in the technology, their stories more commonly address organisational, people, and process challenges. In this post, I will address some of […]

One of the things that I enjoy most about Amazon’s culture is that Customer Obsession is our first leadership principle. I was a customer for 26 years in my various roles at The Coca-Cola Company and benefited from Amazon’s customer obsession. What I found is this often comes down to creating, and constantly making better, […]

We hear a lot of talk these days about digital transformation. Enterprises see that they need to take advantage of new digital technologies and management techniques to become nimbler and to deepen their relationships with customers. Their technology now looks antiquated compared to the digital services they use every day; their processes seem slow compared […]

The roles of the CFO and CIO have been subtly changing. In many enterprises, these roles had veered away from the strategic focus that one would expect from CXOs. But to succeed in the digital world, as I discuss in my book War & Peace & IT, enterprises must let their CIOs and CFOs re-establish […]

There’s a disturbing trend in business today of shorter and shorter company lifespans: the average tenure of an S&P company today is a mere 15 years, compared to 67 years in the 1920s.1 Moreover, in the last 20 years the number of domestic companies on the US Stock Exchange has dropped by half.2 While there are a […]

First in a two-part series In many of our conversations with customers, we hear talk of a “frozen middle”—middle managers in IT who are reluctant to change and either block or slow down attempts at transformation. The idea is that senior leadership wants to gain the benefits of the cloud and digital transformation while line […]

A frequent topic in our conversations with enterprise leaders is just how difficult it is to find people with the right skills for the digital age. We often suggest that their go-to-strategy should be to grow talent internally, developing the skills of people they already employ (an earlier blog post covers this subject as well). But […]

By Aleksandar Simovic Introduction by Mark Schwartz Serverless computing (for example, the capabilities offered by AWS Lambda) is not just a new technology. Its implications—not yet widely understood—include a deep impact on enterprise strategy. Essentially, serverless computing completes the transformation of IT platforms to a utility, something like electricity: whenever you need a little bit […]

by Aleksandar Simovic Introduction by Mark Schwartz, AWS Enterprise Strategist In a post a few months ago titled Micro-Optimization: Activity-Based Costing for Digital Services, I pointed out that serverless computing in the cloud raises the possibility for us to optimize our costs at an extremely granular level, the level of individual functions within an application. Essentially, […]