Management and Strategy

Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch

Advancing technologies and their swift adoption are upending traditional business models. Senior executives need to think strategically about how to prepare their organizations for the challenging new environment.

AUGUST 2010 • Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and James Manyika

Source: McKinsey Global Institute

In This Article

• Trend 1: Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstream
• Trend 2: Making the network the organization
• Trend 3: Collaboration at scale
• Trend 4: The growing ‘Internet of Things’
• Trend 5: Experimentation and big data
• Trend 6: Wiring for a sustainable world
• Trend 7: Imagining anything as a service
• Trend 8: The age of the multisided business model
• Trend 9: Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid
• Trend 10: Producing public good on the grid

Two-and-a-half years ago, we described eight technology-enabled business trends that were profoundly reshaping strategy across a wide swath of industries.¹ We showed how the combined effects of emerging Internet technologies, increased computing power, and fast, pervasive digital communications were spawning new ways to manage talent and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures.

Since then, the technology landscape has continued to evolve rapidly. Facebook, in just over two short years, has quintupled in size to a network that touches more than 500 million users. More than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 450 million of those people the Web is a fully mobile experience. The ways information technologies are deployed are changing too, as new developments such as virtualization and cloud computing reallocate technology costs and usage patterns while creating new ways for individuals to consume goods and services and for entrepreneurs and enterprises to dream up viable business models. The dizzying pace of change has affected our original eight trends, which have continued to spread (though often at a more rapid pace than we anticipated), morph in unexpected ways, and grow in number to an even ten.²

Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch – McKinsey Quarterly – High Tech – Strategy & Analysis

Just read the article "The Quick Wins Paradox" by Van Buren and Safferstone Todd in Harvard Business Review – Jan 2009. It is a good article focusing on things that can make newly appointed leaders successful.

We all agree that new leaders need to show quick wins to gain confidence of their direct reports and the higher level management. Authors suggest 5 main reasons new leaders fail are Focusing too much on details, reacting negatively to criticism, Intimidating others, Jumping to conclusion and Micromanaging.

According to the author new leaders can be successful if they focus on collective quick wins instead of individual wins. They way to achieve collective quick wins are by making people believers not bystanders, understanding uncertainty, showing humility and learning about the team.

The article is very good and you should surely read if you like the brief intro here. Order Here…

One of my close friends recently decided to leave Microsoft and start his own company. He has been with Microsoft for a long time and the change from MS to a starting a new organization will be a big one. When I started thinking about this change I started thinking about my own journey through various organizations. Every organization has an character, a heart and a soul. What do I mean? Let me take you through my journey through these organizations and explain…

Baan(1997-2000): A Successful ERP company trying to accept globalization and experimenting with distributed development across NL, US and India. In 1997 that was tough thing to do with infrastructure limitations and also cultural limitations. There was still frictions between different teams on ownership of work. This instability was not just in development but also in management originally the company was run from NL then it was taken over by management in US. Management styles are very different between NL and US. It was a great learning experience to see how a successful company was struggling to cope up with time.

Nortel(2001): Again a successful company trying to survive in economic downturn. There was chaos everywhere. The goal seemed to be survival to fight another day. It was tough with major layoffs going on in every division. Moral was low and people spend more time in worrying rather than working.

e-Emphasys(2001-2005): An entrepreneurial venture trying to define itself. Are we Consulting company or a Product company? Should we focus on long term strategy or short term gains? How do we refuse lucrative consulting projects today and just focus on product development for long term benefit? It is amazing how this conflict impacted every decision we made. Basically we just could not decide what we were. Some employees loved consulting and working closely with customers other did not like traveling as consultants and were happy doing product development but for a startup you do not have choice you make your call based on daily needs. The key learning was define your strategy and follow it. You cannot do everything successfully and grow.

SAMSys/Sirit(2005-2006): Another small entrepreneurial venture in RFID space struggling to raise capital and survive to see brighter days. We all could see the hockey stick but the rapid growth in industry was just not happening. Finally we just ran out of money and Sirit took us over. The key lesson was raise capital when you can and not when you need it most.

Microsoft(2006-2008): Amazingly successful company trying to maintain alignment across all its products. Think about it when a new release of Visual studio is planned you have to make sure it is compatible with the latest under development release of SQL, Share Point and Office. When new version of BizTalk is built it is also dependent on SQL, Share Point and Office and Visual studio designer. Did I miss the Windows releases. How do you keep all this in sync. It is a complex problem to solve and I think the company does pretty well to maintain this alignment.

Alignment is really crucial for overall success but I personally think it takes too much time and effort and affects time that can be spent on innovation. I am sure someone higher up in the organization thinks about it.

So this brief info about companies I have worked for. What about your companies? What was/is your company like? What does its character look like? Do share with me… Until then enjoy…

Read a good article on businessweek.com. They have predicted 10 things that won’t happen. It is amazing because people like to predict things that will happen. Here is it other way round but it is really interesting stuff. Following are the predictions. Please read the detailed article by following the link below.

1. The writers won’t win the current strike
2. DreamWorks isn’t going to leave Paramount after all
3. Apple won’t reinvent TV viewing
4. Juno won’t win an Academy Award
5. Google (GOOG) won’t buy a media company
6. Indiana Jones won’t be the biggest film of 2008
7. Katie Couric won’t quit
8. The Disney-Pixar deal won’t implode, Part Three
9. Fox Business News won’t close shop
10. MGM won’t be the first Hollywood studio to get sold

Ten Things That Won’t Happen in 2008

Business Week has started a great new section on their website on Management. The section covers managing career, team, company and board. It is a great site with some good case studies and videos. I have subscribed to its blog too. Hopefully the site will have tons of good information going forward. J

Link: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/

    

Yesterday I graduated from UNC with my MBA. You can read more details at http://sudsblog.com/?p=331.

Management is all about connecting with the people on your team. So how do you effectively manage a team? You can read more about this at insidecrm.com. Following is a link to the original article (read more).

digg story

It is difficult to innovate something new. It is more difficult to identify which innovations to fund and most difficult is to make money out of new innovation. I have been writing some posts related to innovation. Following is summary of all the posts related to Innovation.

Identifying and Making Money from Innovation

• Disruptive vs. Sustaining Technology
• The Discipline of Innovation
• Making Money from Innovation. Complementary Assets
• Increasing returns – New world of business

Planning and Managing Innovation

• Discovery driven planning
• Implicit Assumptions in Planning
• Aggregate Project Plan
• Time Pacing
• ACE Matrix
• Entrepreneurial Equilibrium

There are 4 types of professional practices

1. Pharmacist: Where customers know what like an aspirin and they want it at lowest price.
2. Nurse: Here the focus is not just on providing aspirin but on ability to council and guide the client through a process. Customer wants to be involved in decision making process
3. Brain Surgeon: Here customer has a problem and he wants a solution from a expert. He does not want to know how you get the solution.
4. Psychotherapist: In this case customer has a serious problem for which he needs and expert but he wants to be part of the process of solving the product.

    
    

 

Source: What kind of provider are you? (True Professionalism). Free Press.

5 Why’s is a Japanese problem-analysis technique that asks ‘why’ five times when reviewing a problem or situation, with the belief that by the fifth ‘why’ the root cause will be discovered.

5 Whys is a question asking method to determine the root cause of a defect or problem. The five iterations are not gospel, rather it is postulated that five iterations of asking why is generally sufficient to get to the first cause. The real key is to encourage the troubleshooter to avoid assumptions and logic traps and rather to trace the chain of causality in direct increments from the effect through any layers of abstraction to the first or root cause.