Leadership The leadership behaviours I look for When interviewing or developing a leader, I have a set of preferred behaviours, methods and values I look for. Getting this list came after a few mistakes. I've occasionally blogged about how I
Leadership Leaders should know what they stand for Over the last five years I have deliberately become more clear about my values as a leader. As a leader, values are what you stand for. If what you value is absent at
Leadership How to manage your complexity budget There's an important concept that all leaders have an energetic budget with which they get things done. Every demand you face spends some of your complexity budget. My earlier post outlined that idea
Leadership You have a complexity budget. Spend it wisely. Every change you want to drive within a business costs you time and energy. You have a limited capacity of both. If you commit yourself to more change than your own capacity to
Leadership Inertia can ambush change Over the last few years, I came to properly understand this warning from John Kotter about business change: Never underestimate the magnitude of the forces that reinforce complacency and that help maintain the
Tech How cloud-oriented is the app? RightScale lets you easily deploy an application to a cloud provider like AWS or Rackspace. We do this by abstracting your server infrastructure design to a layer above that cloud provider. Consequently, I
Tech Two worlds of cloud Increasingly it’s clear to me that there are two worlds of cloud users, the populations of which often do not realise they are world’s apart. The first is inhabited by traditional
Tech Notes from keynote at Cloud Inspire, Seoul I’m delivering the keynote talk at SK Telecom’s Cloud Inspire event in Seoul, and in preparing my talk about hybrid clouds I reviewed many sources. For those wanting more detail, I
Tech Roll your own "enterprise" hardware Not long ago, I found an article talking about how Google is Intel’s fifth largest customer for server chips. I thought it was a brilliant barometer of the disruption that cloud computing
Tech Noisy neighbours in cloud computing One solution to traffic shaping a congested network: Noisy Neighbours is the current term to describe an age-old phenomena when many users share a medium, in this case with cloud computing it’s
Tech Intel provides view into cloud shift Yesterday’s fascinating article in Wired says that Google is now Intel’s fifth largest client for server chips. In 2008, this Intel division had 75% of its sales to IBM, Dell and
Growth Considering the Agile philosophy within deal pursuits I have been reading about Agile software development philosophy for years and it seems that the core ideas are worth exploring in relation to major deal pursuits. I think I first came across
Growth Six reasons major sales initiatives fail We’ve all seen a major sales initiative that fails to deliver the results expected, for example from a sales force restructure. But what’s the root cause of the failure? Here I
Tech On the strategy of platforms and APIs I’m going to draw a picture about a constellation of news on the importance of platforms in: cloud computing, competitive strategy recruitment incentive. Read all of these and you’ll see the
Leadership On introversion I am so happy about the recent publicity on introversion. I’m an introvert, and am aware of how to get the best out of myself. I’m not shy – that’s a
Growth Being creative to grow when brainstorms fail I have attended far too many brainstorming sessions which have not been framed to make them useful. The science is in. Brainstorming doesn’t work. When and why you need ideas In sales,
Leadership How to interview a sales person I came across two particularly good articles on how to interview and screen a sales person. The first by Dave Kurlan provides an insightful list of 10 behaviours you’d want to see,
Growth Systems thinking as a sales perspective Systems Thinking is a way of looking at the world where one thinks about interactions and relationships rather than isolated elements. This world view means that Systems Thinking is neither a model nor
Growth The deal elements of a solution sale When explaining solution sales to people unfamiliar with complex deal structuring, I have found the attached model very useful. If a person only knows IT product sales, in the simplest situation they might
Growth Solution sales people care about results Recently I was explaining solution sales to a colleague who works in operations and I highlighted that a solution sales person should genuinely care about whether their proposed solution will actually work in
Growth The solution sales versus product sales mentality Broadly, you can categorise what is being sold on a continuum between services and product sales. Within service sales there are further distinctions you can make. A new sales person who is asked
Leadership Impact of complexity on sales I read a good article today on McKinsey’s site. Their report 'putting complexity in its place' talks about organisational complexity, and makes an important distinction between individual and organisational complexity. few executives
Growth Thoughts on sales training The characteristics of the services Training for a salesforce that is goaled on complex services or solution sales is markedly different to the training for a heavily product-oriented salesforce. Further, there is a
Growth Exception management processes for complex deals If you google for ‘exception management sales’, the kinds of answers relate to product sales and not services or solution sales. You’ll find answers from codified sales tools like SAP. This failure
Leadership Stakeholder management I’ve noticed some sales organisations have differences in the degree of stakeholder management expected within a project, change initiative or complex deal. Stakeholder management, for a sales person, is knowing who cares