From the category archives:

Strategy Execution

How startups can out-execute the big guys

April 7, 2010

I couldn’t miss an event billed “How I beat my competition by out-executing them with Gurbaksh Chahal and Lyle Fong “, a VLAB Emerging Business Event in their “Entrepreneurs Uncensored” series. Gurbaksh and Lyle are two very inspiring entrepreneurs. Just hearing their stories made for a great event.  But they were there with a message [...]

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Innovation in Entrepreneurship – A Case Study on Keen Mobility

March 10, 2010

This post first appeared on Blogging Innovation as Helping Others Go Vertical on 3/7/2010 Keen Mobility is a story of innovation, invention and entrepreneurship. Innovation is often focused on inventions and new products, but innovation is also a new way of thinking about conventional wisdom.  Jeffrey Phillips wrote an insightful post “Innovation, Invention and Entrepreneurs”, [...]

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Excellence in Execution is Infrastructure

November 9, 2009

My guest post on SuccessFactors Business Execution blog 11/6/09: CEO’s continue to rate execution excellence as their top challenge. But what does “excellence in execution” actually mean? The CEO wants to turn the wheel and have the ship respond, but according to extensive research repeated year after year, only 10-15% of wheel turns get the [...]

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How to Get Out of Fire Drill Mode

September 17, 2009

I work with many tech companies. When I talk to the leadership team, they worry about company strategy and how to make it happen. But when I talk to the troops, their biggest challenge is being told that the 10,000 things they need to do today are of equal priority. The company is stuck in [...]

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Why RoX is the New ROI

September 10, 2009

Wow! SuccessFactors has just picked up a bullhorn and yelled “Hey everybody, it’s about execution!” Today the company unveiled itself as The Business Execution Software Company, kicking off the new era with their manifesto Return on Execution by Erik Berggren, Director of Customer Results & Global Research, and Lars Dalgaard, CEO. Execution has for too [...]

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Why Scrappy Tech Companies Should Pay Themselves First

September 1, 2009

I love working with scrappy tech companies. You know the kind: full of fighting spirit, heads-down, close to the customer, focused on delivering excellence day-to-day. These aren’t the kind of people that put together a slide deck to shop around for funding or put their toe in the water and dabble with a company idea. [...]

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Why you should hire Product Managers

July 16, 2009

“Hire product managers when you want to sell to someone who is not just like you” – hard earned experience by NetApp’s David Hitz. I’ve worked with many tech companies that, sadly for their customers and for their business, don’t want to invest in marketing and product management isn’t even on their radar. Product Managers [...]

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The Vision Thing

June 28, 2009

Sarah Lacy asks an excellent question in her recent Tech Crunch post, Is Execution More Important Than Vision? She walks us through a couple fun “pioneers have arrows in their backs” stories where pioneers like Napster didn’t see the rewards of the iTunes who came after the trail was blazed.  She concludes that Silicon Valley [...]

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How to Twitter (and Build a Company) – Find Your Lead

June 12, 2009

I am a fairly recent twitterer and to my surprise, I find it compelling. I seem to find more interesting and relevant links from Twitter than from my RSS feeds, even though I have hundreds more of those. What is it about Twitter? This puzzled me. Then yesterday I read this great blog post that [...]

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Keep on Rolling

June 2, 2009

You start your new company, full of energy and momentum. Your team is aligned under the banner of simple yet powerful values. You company is agile, takes risks, innovates and solves problems as they arrive. Then you grow the next notch, implement a budget and planning process, and wait, do I hear those entrepreneurial wheels [...]

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