Scenes from a BBQ Restaurant
Years ago, a young man, let’s call him D, with whom I had once gone to summer camp followed his dream and opened a meat restaurant. They had great big burgers, flaming wings, fresh onion rings and...
View ArticleThe Purpose of a Business is to Create and Keep a Customer
“The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” – Peter Drucker No matter how many times we say it, we forget it. We get caught up in operations, or competition, or marketshare, or share...
View ArticleMind the Gap
What does “mind the gap” – familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. “the Tube”, have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit. Starbucks’ largest metropolitan...
View ArticleHow to do True Cloud
Now that we understand what the cloud is, the types of cloud services, the difference between true cloud and hosting, why true cloud matters greatly, and how it makes you nimble, the inevitable...
View ArticleKill Your SLA
Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don’t matter. All that matters is customer expectation in real time. You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers...
View ArticleMission Soundbite
Normally, I dislike the phrase “soundbite”. It implies a shallow, bite-sized saying that misses all of the depth, nuance and complexity that exists in the real world. Nonetheless, soundbites are...
View ArticleHeroku and Product Management
I have been impressed with Heroku for a long time. Their simple to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has made it incredibly easy for software developers to deploy applications lightly and cheaply, and...
View ArticleMore Fun To Higher Sales
For many years, business was assumed to be “staid” or “proper”. Certain dress and behaviour was appropriate for outside the office, and never to be seen inside. While the distinction between...
View ArticleWhen Not to Outsource
In earlier articles, we discussed How to Outsource and When to Outsource. Today, we turn to when not to Outsource. At first blush, we expect not to outsource when our candidate does not meet at least...
View ArticleDon’t Break Your Customers
Anyone who does Web-scale or information technology over the past two years knows containers. The primary reason is the success of docker in making not-so-new containers easy to build, deploy, manage...
View ArticleSales-Product Tension: Small Companies Scale and Big Companies Fail
Steve Denning has a great short article in Forbes, referencing Peggy Noonan on what Steve Jobs had to say about why big companies fail. The article is worth reading – actually, the entire Isaacson...
View ArticleWhat About Yahoo’s Original Business?
Yesterday, we looked at how the market values Yahoo, and tried to understand why a company with $6.3BN in net assets, and another $31BN in a fairly liquid equity investment is valued only at… $31BN!...
View ArticleThe Pain Caused By Poor Software Design
Over the last few month, I was reminded – twice, painfully each time – about the impacts of good vs. bad software design choices, especially the impact those choices can have downstream. Ironically, it...
View ArticleWhy Customers Agree to Open-Source
Why do customers agree to open-source work I do? In the past, we have discussed the benefits of open-sourcing your own software: Reputation Recruiting Contributions Recently, I had the pleasure of...
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