Giri Fox

Ownership will distinguish you

I often talk about ownership as a desirable characteristic for people in my team, whether as a manager or an individual contributor, so what does taking ownership really mean? When someone taking ownership describes obstacles or something unexpected having gone wrong, their language won’t tend to sound like an

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 seek both clarity and root cause as part of my method of getting things done. I'm a

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 work, their absence makes work relationships troublesome. Being asked to compromise on them within a workplace would

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 and credits its originators. As a leader, if you have more demands that you can satisfy, an

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 fulfil it, you are most likely to execute the change poorly or have it fail. This sounds

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 status quo. That's from his book Leading Change, which my friend and colleague Wayne recommended to me

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 often have conversations about whether an existing application is a suitable candidate for the cloud. The less

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 enterprise IT users. Extending the analogy, it has more terra firma than clouds. The second has a

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 have put together some notes below. Research on cloud adoption, applications and cloud developers: RightScale Cloud Survey

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 is making to the traditional enterprise hardware providers, like Dell, IBM and HP. RedMonk recently wrote an

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 sharing CPU, storage and networking. In IP networking, one solution is Quality of Service (QoS) which helps

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 HP. Five years later, the same 75% is spread across eight buyers, the fifth being Google. This

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 Agile thinking in about 1999, in the form of extreme programming. At the time though I only

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 will explore the reasons hidden in the background and the ways in which they can be successfully

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 pattern. Profound gifts to the open source LinkedIn open sourced one of their core systems, called SenseiDB.

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 common misunderstanding – but I prefer the inner world and gain energy from it. Too much time in

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, we will want to come up with creative ideas to grow our accounts, penetrate new ones, grow

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, and 10 bad ones too. He likes it if candidates: talk concisely versus ramble distract him from

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 a methodology1. It’s an approach, or a perspective. It can be taught. I believe it’s

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 negotiate on elements like price, warranty, installation costs and possibly third-party integration. In a solution sale, the

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 the client’s environment. This was to contrast the degree to which a solution sales person should

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 to sell commoditised products like PCs or laptops will firstly need to understand the product characteristics, and

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 have a realistic understanding of how complexity actually affects their own companies. When pressed, many leaders cite

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 distinction to be made with these classifications of services: high touch / high tech services discretely / continuously rendered

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 reminds me a little of typical marketing literature which often talks about products to the exclusion of