I went to catch up with my friends coming to VMworld 2010 at San Francisco from around the world and ended up meeting some upcoming technology players as well. In the course of my discussions, I recognized the existence of a lot more energy in the cloud ecosystem – big and small, private and public cloud service providers and enterprises seriously exploring adoption opportunities.
First on VMware : The most important message that is coming across clearly is the ambition of VMware in becoming a key player across the stack - covering server and desktop virtualization and application platforms. This comes at a time when the number of virtualized servers set up this year exceeded the number of actual physical servers set up and this is expected to grow further – we have seen projections that show that the installed base of virtual machines will grow 5Xin three years. One can see in VMware’s strategy a broadly outlined roadmap for internal clouds built on the server virtualization hypervisor layer with an integrated management (including security) backplane directly as part of the platform. Clearly, it is time for more established infrastructure players like BMC, CA, HP to be concerned about. I liked their announcement to provide more robust support and agility to port between internal and external Clouds – this move makes VMware a more strong player in the cloud ecosystem. VMware’s ambition does not end with being just the operating system for the data center, but wants to be a big player with the means of assuring the flow of enterprise bits between data centers —a synonym for cloud to many. VMware knows the cloud is nebulous in terms of where information can travel, but it also knows that enterprises are uncomfortable with the nebulous and uncontrolled flow of bits, so it’s acquiring companies and offering products that will help it create the logical boundaries in an IT atmosphere veering toward abstraction. VMware is building a new application platform for next generation cloud applications leveraging SpringSource and partnering with Salesforce.com through vmforce.
Since it is VMworld, it always begs the question what next for their customers. After all, the percentage of new servers running virtualization as the primary boot option will approach 90 percent by 2012, according to analysts. For many moving apps into cloud becomes a next logical step. Afterall, the movement toward private clouds started, with the virtualized data center and virtualized desktops. The movement toward broader cloud computing began for the enterprise with data center virtualization and consolidation of server, storage, and network resources to reduce redundancy and wasted space and equipment with measured planning of both architecture (including facilities allocation and design) and process. Depending on the maturity of their adoption cycle, enterprises end up adopting different flavors of the cloud.I always maintain that business would embrace the right cloud at the right time – be it private, hybrid or public but the eventual goal would be to move everything into the public cloud to leverage true cloud benefits. While this may look logical, the path was not always a direct one for all embracing such a journey. Many approaches are being tried – the most ambitious one the introduction of publicly shared core services—much like domain name system (DNS) and peering services—into carrier and service provider networks will enable a more loosely coupled relationship between the customer and the cloud provider. With such infrastructure and services enables, enterprises will be able to choose among service providers, and federated service providers will be able to share service loads. Implication: Such a looser relationship will increase the elasticity of the cloud market and create a single, public, open cloud internetwork: the intercloud. Now, with federation and application portability as the cornerstones of the intercloud, businesses will be able to achieve business process freedom and innovate, and users will experience choice and faster, better services. Obviously a journey like this involves careful planning, co-ordination and provides leverageable opportunities across the board. Consulting majors have defined approaches to help business move along this path as painlessly as could be possible.It is actually a good thing that VMware has realized that virtualisation is a commodity now and management of virtual solutions is the key Lets begin at the beginning to re-emphasize the perspective on cloud computing. Cloud computing model ought to provide resources and services , abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided on demand and at scale in a multi-tenant environment. In addition to its on-demand quality and its scalability, cloud computing can provide the enterprise with some key advantages like :
- Global deployment & support capabilities, with policy-based control by geography and other factors - Operational efficiency from consistent infrastructure, policy-based automation, and trusted multi-tenant operations - Integrated service management interfaces ( catalog management, provisioning etc.)native to the cloud - Regulatory compliance ( both global and local) through automated data policies - Better TCO and increased ease of operations
If we examine cloud computing particularly private clouds through this prism , it throws up some interesting insights. Different enterprises are getting ready to embrace the cloud but have different starting points and not without much trade-off analysis as to the best direction or computing model. To add to the confusion, I saw in the VMWorld meet, a number of players (some promising, I should say), talk about helping in setting private clouds in a manner suggesting a simplistic switch to the clouds. I also know that there are some cloud service players offering to provide readymade solutions to make business embrace private clouds faster and easier to adopt. This is startling so to say – a readymade solution may be farfetched ( clear analogy : a decade back some were promising to make enterprises web ready easily – we all know how different it is to enable business to be web enabled – certainly no readymade solutions nor shortcuts could have worked there). Migration, workload balancing, and integration – all are overbearing issues to be resolved and certainly not minor things to be glossed over. The problem is that transitioning to a cloud-enabled environment can involve large degrees of technical, cultural and budgetary evolution, and it is of utmost importance that organizations deploy the right solution. Private clouds should be differentiated with hybrid clouds. (Note :A hybrid cloud uses both external (under the control of a vendor) and internal (under the control of the enterprise) cloud capabilities to meet the needs of an application system. A private cloud lets the enterprise choose, and control the use of, both types of resources).
Evidently, cloud shift is not an easy journey. The greatest barrier to cloud adoption would be for enterprises to make that switch – that would mean crossing so many issues centered on excitement to fear and uncertainty. This is a paradigm shift and not just an incremental change and as such would require planning, co-ordination and leadership to traverse the path. Initially, the administrative change would be far more pronounced as the shift happens and if this is entrusted to an external vendor – it would call for serious planning and training as the new environment would be dramatically different from what existed in the past.
Business need to be wary of so called cloud solutions that are made to look like off-the-shelf cloud solutions given that there is a frenzied interest in business circles to adopt cloud in some form. Genuinely some would go for the most ell thought out, most rigorous approach and at the other end there would be some wanting to embrace cloud in a tentative, easy to slip-in manner. The level of confusion in how to adopt from business side seems to be in lock with the high decibel, cloud - easy to embrace target marketing. This state of affairs may tempt business to look for solutions that stretches their infrastructure a bit but leverages more of what they have – a combination clearly far from ideal.
New partnership and alliances between cloud service providers and consulting firms are providing a good onramp towards private, hybrid and public clouds. This should reassure business for a variety of reasons – choice, balance in terms of solution and broad body of expertise that comes together. Initiatives like this could slowly begin to bring an orderly discipline towards cloudswitch by enterprises. This should also facilitate adding flexibility to selectively opt –out part of services in their portfolio be it towards migrating to other clouds, or integrating with other clouds etc. With a robust ecosystem like this, solidified solutions specific to each and every business needs (emphasis is on distinct customized solutions) with multitenant architectures measurable on multiple factors like scalability, agility, access, flexibility etc should begin to provide a reasonably firm cloud foundation for business. The message is watch not only for the right cloud but also look for the right ecosystem and right consulting methodology to get enduring benefits.
An interesting thread is now on within the enterprise irregulars group on what constitutes private clouds –as again very enlightened discussion therein. The issue that I want to talk about is if private cloud do indeed exist, then what is their adoption path ? Lets start from the beginning : the issue is can we can use the term ”cloud” for describing the changes that happen inside IT architectures within enterprise? Thought there can be no definitive answer – a series of transition to a new order of things, will in my opinion, become imminent.
The pressures on IT & the engulfing sense of change in the IT landscape are hard to overlook. The pressures would mean more business begin to seriously look at SaaS, re-negotiating license terms, focusing on rapid adoption of virtualization etc. As part of this and beyond, internal IT would be forced more and more to show more bang for the buck and it is my view that organizations would begin to look more and more to question committed costs and begin to aggressively look at attacking them more systematically – earlier sporadic efforts marked their endeavors. This could also unlock additional resources that could potentially go towards funding new initiatives. There are enough number of enterprises going this route and their service partners are also in some cases prodding them to go this way.
The change in many senses may make IT inside enterprises to look , behave and perform like cloud computing providers – though there would be limitations( in most places serious) on scale, usage assessments , security and the like. There are strong incentives propelling enterprises to channel their efforts and investments over the next few years in mimicking a private cloud service architecture that gets managed by them internally. This could well become their approach of staging towards finally embracing the cloud(public) over a period of time . These baby steps to nearly full blown efforts are needed in preparing organizations to embrace clouds and it may not be feasible at all to make the shift from on-premise to cloud like flip switch. Serious licensing issues, maturity, lack of readiness, integration concerns, security all come in the way of enterprises looking at public cloud in a holistic way. These steps need not be looked down – they would very well become the foundation to move into public clouds in a big way.
Let’s for a moment assess this theme from a security perspective - a dominant concern business expresses when it comes to clouds. While assessing security requirements in public clouds,we see the recognition that a whole host of chnages need to be done at application architecture levels, the need to accomodate specific compliance requirements, privacy provisions in the public cloud etc.
Lets think through this : setting up private cloud is a motherhood statement at best( in many organizational surveys, one can find setting private clouds is not in the CIO’s top three priorities – if anything virtualization finds a place-) to make this happen in a credible way means re-examining most parts of IT functioning and business –IT relationship inside enterprises. IT teams while conceptualizing private clouds are happy to retain existing architectural designs, happily propose a clasical DMZ/Perimeterized model for providing security and enabling access, too often leveraging a highly virtualized infrastructure. More often than not, it’s enabling virtualization, automation and self service and color it as private cloud. Do recognize the implicit differences in constructing a private cloud and a public cloud. Comfort with the status quo with some adjustments versus an opportunity to rethink architecture, security, privacy,compliance needs in a way summarizes the nature of thought process and expected results between the private and public clouds. Speaking more directly, public clouds present the opportunity for enterprises to review and achieve specific requirements in the areas like agility, flexibility and efficiency at optimal effort Versus a skewed , boxed implementation of private cloud setup. Taking advantage of the public cloud benefits would far outweigh the advantages of getting boxed inside with private clouds.
Most elements of the bedrock gets affected – the processes, culture, metrics, performance, funding, service levels etc. Well thought out frameworks, roadmaps need to be put in place to make this transition successful. These frameworks need to cater not only to setting up internal cloud but eventually help in embracing the public cloud over the years- not an easy task as it appears. A few of those organizations that master this transition may also look at making business out of these – so it’s a journey – that needs to be travelled onto embracing public clouds. Some business may take a staged approach and call it by private cloud, internal cloud or whatever but eventually the road may lead into public clouds!
Cisco founded in 1984,is a global technology powerhouse and a very admired corporation. Its seminal breakthrough of the router connecting two different computer networks laid the seed for the internet enabled networking industry.. Today, as we look ahead, Cisco is positioned to lead the evolution of the network to enable a ‘connected future’ which is increasingly "collaborative, video-driven, personalized, and mobile." With more than 7,000 patents, Cisco today is the worldwide leader in networking technologies that are changing how the world works, lives, plays and learns. The company’s commitment to innovation, customers have been key to Cisco’s success over the years—and it helps shape the future of the Internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for customers, employees, investors and ecosystem partners. In less than fifteen years since it was started in 1984, Cisco achieved the feat of the most valuable company ever on earth when its market cap soared to 500 +billion dollars during the dot.com boom era. Cisco is one of Fortune's most admired companies, and being a technology bellwether, has successfully managed multiple transitions in its last 25 plus years of existence. In the mid-1990s, for example, Cisco was strictly a router and switch vendor. But over time Cisco has moved from making gear for data networks to providing all kinds of equipment for voice communications and video systems, highlighted by products like Cisco TelePresence. The company has also become much more focused on software to make networks work even better for communicating, collaborating and entertaining. Perhaps more importantly, Cisco has also been able to reinvent its business operations – continuously!
Cisco is also widely credited as the tech company which has done maximum number of acquisitions in the last ten years and it scores as the leader in a number of areas and initiatives. Understanding Cisco’s mind and its style of execution is something that every investor, partner, executives across industry show interest in. Inder Sidhu, Cisco’s Senior Vice President has come out with a lovely book titled “Doing Both” describing Cisco’s strategy for success. Inder Sidhu points out that by pursuing new and existing business models alike- Cisco has positioned itself to be as nimble as it is strong and as flexible as it is precise. That, contends Sidhu helps Cisco when market transitions frequently! It should be noted that this book is not about technology. Instead, it addresses the fundamental dilemma that every business struggles with at some point - making a choice between two equally attractive strategic alternatives. Some of the nature of choices Cisco had to navigate through as brought out in the book include:
• Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation • Existing and New Business Models • Optimization and Reinvention • Satisfied Customers and Gratified Partners • Established and Emerging Countries • Doing Things Right and Doing What Matters • Superstar Performers and Winning Teams • Authoritative Leadership and Democratic Decision Making
This is highly relevant in fast changing industries like High Tech where Cisco operates. Arguably, some may say that with globalization comes heightened competition and therefore the pace of change has substantially increased for every large industry in the world. The book brings how in Cisco’s DNA the philosophy of exerting both choices is built inside and how in its various points in history, Cisco was guided by this approach leading to spectacular business success. The book brings out the various business models that Cisco planned to pursue and executed around Consumer, Video, Services & Collaboration space. As Sidhu shows how Cisco sort of walked the talk and shares details, the reading of the book becomes more interesting and as we reflect on these, realization dawns about the significance of how tough those decisions must have been to even conceive and still more difficult to execute!
The eight principal dilemmas that the book showcases from the prism of Cisco’s decision making and execution of those make a fantastic reading. Among those covered are classic dilemmas like investing in incremental innovation vs breakthrough innovation simultaneously. Some might think that larger organizations are bestowed with the ability to take right decisions and make those decisions work out successfully. In reality, such a proposition is far from being true - swift decision making and flawless execution are not easily achievable inside large enterprises. Just imagine how may stakeholders need to align to create something new or modify something that exists – enormous pressures from different directions would make it hard for such shared objectives and well aligned execution to happen easily.
The strategic insights that the book provides are quite interesting- such as how Cisco manages the partner channel – how they changed the channel strategy, the globalization initiative of Cisco, deputing talents to potential spin-in’s, the fabled Cisco operational committee’s – Discussions centered around these areas provide a very powerful insight into the decision making rythms of the ever successful industry leader.
If we sort of step back from a very absorbing reading pleasure the book extends – (I finished reading the book in less than 24 hours after I got the book – this while attending to other things), I am drawn to the classical innovator’s dilemma paradigm of Clayton Christensen- he has written extensively on what characterizes a sound management framework. In a nutshell he outlines the framework in terms of ability to have a good set of state mechanisms that executives would go through on varying circumstances and then by extension the mechanisms to make right decisions towards an efficient and successful navigation. Seasoned executives are sort of trained to parse through this framework many times to know what could be the most appropriate path to take in a given context. The grind of analysis of known contexts and the audacity to traverse new paths when faced with a new type of context makes radical winners (like Cisco) more special and those are the type of insights that this book brings out.
Inder Sidhu brings out the key tenets of of Cisco's strategy, very well with his theme based discussions . Cisco is an outstanding exemplar of a firm that has been able to combine profits and productivity - today's success - and expansion and adaptation in an uncertain environment leading to tomorrow's growth. This is the core theme of the book: the seamless fusion inside Cisco of highly optimized operations co-existing with truly flexible, innovative and adaptive continuous expansion. This is a tall order – very very few high tech companies have been so consistently successful as Cisco is in pursuing this strategy – in fact examples of companies that could not manage ever evolving transitions abound in the high tech space. Making spin-in acquisitions for talent, new ideas, new lines of business have proven to be a tough task to execute by many business
As a company besotted with growth, Cisco keeps trying multiple options and in the process tries many novel things to keep growing and maintaining the margins. The principles and the thought process behind the acquisitions like Linksys, Scientific Atlanta, Webex make great reading- I particularly liked the discussion about what new things Cisco got out of these acquisitions in terms of learning and practice knowledge besides their products and services – this is very very important to know that such a culture of reverse assimilation is institutionalized inside Cisco. The rest of the book is skillfully presented and interesting. It captures Cisco's multifaceted strategy well and is full of insights into global strategy and execution – It covers significant areas like how Cisco re-jigged its supply chain soon after it had to write off 2 billion dollars in the dot com bust attributed to supply chain build up, Cisco’s globalization efforts including how it scaled up India as the alternate global headquarters outside of San Jose . For example in the case of supply chain, Cisco implemented a rationalization plan that brought 1300 component suppliers down to less than 300 in four years and it reduced the number of contract manufacturers that it worked with from 20 to 4 in the same timeframe. The book shows that today Cisco is able to handle two times the volume that it had during dot com days and more importantly could get this done with half the people! Successful companies need to take tough decisions and execute on those decisions very well and the book shows Cisco is no exception on this. Another important reading in the book is around Cisco’s structure to bring executive teams together to drive new initiatives together and charter areas of growth around new ideas. Inside Cisco, powers have been shifted from traditional business owners –like head of sales, marketing, engineering into councils and boards, populated with executives across the company. These councils and boards complement the traditional hierarchy, providing scale and replicability of a centralized company and the speed and flexibility of a decentralized one. Cisco’s IT absorption in the last ten years is well chronicled and the insights into how it is now trying to push the collaboration framework inside shows the unending zeal with which Cisco keeps pushing new frontiers. A very lucid description of Cisco’s decision making mechanism is covered inside the book. Takeaway : A highly collaborative system can also move fast if properly driven and can yield significant returns.
The book , I think by design avoids picking on how Cisco outbid the competition in a myriad number of areas it competes - understandable as this book is meant to chronicle Cisco’s internal process , systems and decision making mechanism. Some very powerful examples of failed business models pursued by Escada, Harley Davidson amongst others and how Cisco avoided getting trapped like them makes this book a comprehensive read.
I recommend this book as a refreshing and lively read. This is a classic book – one that chronicles the global strategy and high class execution prowess of Cisco , a top technology player in the world! Very rarely, we will see such a well chronicled book on a successful mega corporation come out from executives inside the organization - Sidhu is an exemplary writer – he brings the situation that he writes about right in front of the eyes of the reader and the discussions are centered around very important aspects of running global business. Highly recommended reading for business leaders and practitioners around the world.
Vivek Wadhwa writes,"Patents make a lot of sense in many industries; they are needed to protect the designs of important components or design of physical products. But in software these are just nuclear weapons in an arms race. They don’t foster innovation, they inhibit it. He adds, That’s because things change rapidly in this industry. Speed and technological obsolescence are the only protections that matter. Fledgling startups have to worry more about some big player or patent troll bankrupting them than they do about someone stealing their ideas". A recent Berkley patent survey shows,venture backed business file for more patents as against startups across industries including software. Brad Feld points out to the absurdity behind the idea of patents. Bob Warfield with multiple startup credits and himself a patent holder points out how difficult it is to fight suits against patent trolls. He points to several absurd situations that we all come across in the name of patents while defending genuine progress.
Earlier we covered why patent systems need to be disciplined and went to the extent of saying that its time to abolish patents for atleast software industry. On the other hand some people think that we have reached the dark age of innovation – Physicist Heubner says that rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, major innovations & scientific advances peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since. While examining number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. when he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915. The global rate of innovation today, which is running at seven "important technological developments" per billion people per year, matches the rate in 1600. Despite far higher standards of education and massive R&D funding "it is more difficult now for people to develop new technology”.
Patents impede innovation and not encourage innovation. Innovation may be the core to success and it is not be mistaken against patents or R&D budgets. As Michael Scrage wrote brilliantly, the simple fact is that R&D spending is an input, not a measure of efficiency, effectiveness or productivity. Ingenuity, invention and innovation are rarely functions of budgetary investment & pointed to the fact that Wal-Mart, Texco and Dell have miniscule R&D budgets, their quality, procurement and growth requirements have probably done more to drive productive innovation investment than any competing initiatives. Growing market competition, not growing R&D spending, is what drives innovation. A successful innovation policy is a competition policy where companies see innovation as a cost-effective investment to differentiate themselves profitably. John Hagel adds that it is a fallacy in equating patents with innovation. Normally the focus is on product innovation, ignoring process and business model innovation. Process innovation is far more powerful than product innovation – it has a multiplier effect that product innovation can rarely match & notes that the only effective measure of innovation activity is the rate of productivity improvement in an enterprise – the growth in value added generated per employee. Static productivity measures can be misleading & what may really count is the ability to sustain and amplify productivity improvements through innovative products, process improvements or new business models. Lets all shout for more innovation and whatever comes in the way that may include patents – lets get rid of them!
Just finished some random reading. Started with Jeane Bliss on customer loyalty and Zappos is profiled therein in detail. Zappos decision making paradigm seems to be centered around making far reaching changes happen as part of their DNA. As Tony Hseih says in his afterword of Jeane Bliss book on customer loyalty –“Decision making not purposefully directed can lead your company down a path and to an unintended conclusion. Products, Services, Companies can be taken down the wrong direction whereas well thought out , purposeful decision making centered around customer needs can make a huge difference to business growth !
The more and more I think of it , decision making gets more impactful when it meets the trajectory of change. Look at Seth Godin’s post on the calculus of change. Seth outlines how how a change in operating systems (from DOS to Windows) made people look at different things – in this case, people began to rethink about choice in word processors. The leader at that time was Word Perfect but when Windows began to take centerstage, World also grew along with it -all this while Word Perfect was not ready on the Windows platform. The closest analogy is in Smartphones and where Android is set to get to the top of the heap, many business are having just an iPhone app and not investing in getting an Android App out fast. The point of maximum disruptive timing is the point where people have to make something new or different to happen, got to make a change and can't be avoided.
Extend this logic. When is the last time when the sales , marketing & customer service function of our business got a refresh – no am not taking about just changing people but the process, measures, response etc. Extend this a litte further – when did the core technologies that run our business enterprise get a meaningful refresh – Am talking about Enterprise Software here. Today emerging technologies revolve around Java, MySQL, Open Source, Cloud Computing, and Web 2.0 Social Media. Clearly, these did not exist in full form when the current enterprise software leaders began to dominate the space. Each one of these forces are powerful forces of disruption .
As the beneficiaries and victims of the technology gap phenomenon can testify. For people in both the camps, everything in their digital lives have changed so much. Today, 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.Alas the big fat guys of the technology world are so slow to embrace and make them as part of their core offerings. We all know the lessons of history.
Look at what change can do to the employed. The evolution of the role of the employed is indeed remarkable. Thomas Malone believes that we're headed for equilibrium in the global wage market.It may take a decade or two, but at some point, people capable of doing work will get paid roughly the same amount wherever they are. It will happen a lot faster than people think," Malone said. He earlier wrote,"Four decentralized organizational structures—loose hierarchies, democracies, external markets, and internal markets—that will be enabled by technology but centered around enduring human values shall be the dominant model. The shift from "command-and-control" management to "coordinate-and-cultivate," and the new skills that will be required to succeed would become critical to succeed. A framework for determining if a company’s situation is ripe for decentralizing and which organizational structure would be most effective would evolve".
Mckinsey identifies ten important tech-enabled business trends to watch out- Its an important read. For the first six trends, which can be applied across an enterprise, it will be important to assign the responsibility for identifying the specific implications of each issue to functional groups and business units. The impact of these six trends—distributed cocreation, networks as organizations, deeper collaboration, the Internet of Things, experimentation with big data, and wiring for a sustainable world—often will vary considerably in different parts of the organization and should be managed accordingly. Three of the trends—anything-as-a-service, multisided business models, and innovation from the bottom of the pyramid—augur far-reaching changes in the business environment that could require radical shifts in strategy. CEOs and their immediate senior teams need to grapple with these issues; otherwise it will be too difficult to generate the interdisciplinary, enterprise-wide insights needed to exploit these trends fully.
Mckinsey rightly observes, the pace of technology and business change will only accelerate, and the impact of the trends above will broaden and deepen. For some organizations, they will unlock significant competitive advantages; for others, dealing with the disruption they bring will be a major challenge. It’s clear that organizations should incorporate an understanding of the trends into their strategic thinking to help identify new market opportunities, invent new ways of doing business, and compete with an ever-growing number of innovative rivals. Embracing change in every major twist and turn is an absolute must and decision making process that can force technology companies to respond in a timely and efficient manner would bring huge rewards to the stakeholders of the business. To keep trying to change regularly needs to be in the decision framework and DNA of sustainable growth focused business . Watch out for the alternative : Standing still is the kiss of the death and those standing with deep roots would not see such waves of change but when they get affected, it would be a massive hit for them.
The Enterprise Software space is undergoing big change. No, I am not talking about just the shift to SaaS, Cloud, Potentially increasing spend etc. Its seeing momentum of a different kind - form a moment of pause, it is getting rediscovered as being sexy again. Different enterprise players make different moves to sort of remain relevant and continue their growth. This week, Adobe announces its plan to buy Swiss software maker Day Software. Day Software is a content management company focused on the high growth markets of Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Social Collaboration and Targeting & Optimization. A quick reading shows that following Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture in September 2009, this move by Adobe is clearly aimed at getting into the web experience management (WEM) market place . The expectation here is that Adobe would help its customers through its combined offerings the capabilities to bring together the audience insight gained through the web analytics of Omniture and Day’s CRX content platform. The acquisition price is about US$240 mn, a 67% premium over Day’s last 90-day average price. Analysts note that Day Software had $44 mn in TTM revenue (based on filings and current exchange rate) and has been growing at 40% yoy. Goldman Sachs estimates the EV value of Adobe to be about $214 mn, which implies an EV/LTM revenue multiple of 5.1X vs. 5.0X for Adobe’s Omniture acquisition.
Day has been positioning itself as a leader in the web experience management space for a while. Web experience management, sometimes called customer experience management acts a single platform to manage all interactions, across a variety of apps and business systems like ERP, CRM etc. Day’s products like Web CMS CQ5 and their content repository CRX will become integral bedrock to this solution set. Adobe has outlined its vision of leveraging the benefits of Day being a leader in the WEM market and a as a heavyweight in developing the concept of next generation content management with focus on web experience. Day comes with an array of capabilities – particularly its Social Collaboration and CQ 5.3 Personalization, Segmentation and Targeting capabilities make its case as a leading player in the arena of web engagement.
Day Software has been making substantial efforts to improve on their capabilities and were sort of repositioning themselves as THE WEB EXPERIENCE management Company for some time and were building rich functionalities centered around personalization, collaboration and analytics leveraging its content repositories. A robust content repository integrated well with a variety of functionality centric add-ons one that can integrate with social networks is a killer combination and that’s the direction that Day was moving towards. A larger company like Adobe with higher resources and a killer analytics product like Omniture in its stable can potentially create a new momentum for Day’s product. The integration roadmap would be a key thing to watch here. Day might be less known in US corporate circles given that it is Europe headquartered and most of the leading CMS players are US headquartered, but Day has widely known in the open source and open standards community. Day has been an active contributor to the Apache projects like Sling & Jackrabbit and the open source community is watching to see how Adobe will work on this moving forward. Similarly Day has been a big supporter of CMS repository standards (JCR and CMIS, JSR standards) and it has to be seen what direction Adobe would like to take moving forward post the acquisition. For some, Adobe and open standards represent opposite ends of the spectrum!
For Adobe, a big player in the creative and front end space, this deal is significant, as it helps them to do two things:
A. First time Adobe gets a real shot at getting a slice in the back end – content management space – traditionally they have partnered to get a grip on this space and have made limited impact with their own efforts in getting there thus far. It’s a paradox that was unfathomable for awhile and with this move, Adobe gets a real crack at it.
B. Adobe, based on the nature of their core business has been mostly doing shrink wrapped solutions whereas a content management solution has to be sold to enterprises as an infrastructure with different sales and support mechanisms.
However, for their customers, some answers to questions /scenarios like these are very important :
A. How would Adobe help move Day’s offering into cloud – given Omniture’s experience in the cloud and Adobe’s clickstream and how much and which way these could be brought to work with Day’s software. (Moving transactional data and content into the cloud is the hottest area for enterprises today – this is a VERY BIG OPPORTUNITY here)
B. Day’s customers would be hoping that Adobe keeps the direction of the product evolution in its core areas and can invest more and accelerate research and development besides potentially integrating with Omniture and Adobe’s content creation tools.
C. Adobe has OEM’d Alfresco in some of its Livecycle Enterprise - how classy Day product could integrate there is an open issue.
D. Cultural Integration : Day Software is Swiss based software maker and Adobe is primarily based in the Silicon Valley and ably supported by their teams in India – this is going to be kind of tough getting them together . (My view is for Adobe to leverage Day’s talent besides in integrating Day products with Adobe by leveraging them to work in Adobe platforms like Extensible Metadata Platforms
The risks of enterprise software mergers and integration are well know but in this case , the space is a reasonably neat fit (with some minor conflicts) but the upside possibilities abound!. The hidden value is to bring together content creation, content management and analytics together and straddle the transaction to analytics value chain - this is indeed a great space to play in. On the whole, upside for Day’s customers exist but Adobe needs a very finely thought out plan, to be executed really fast and with sophistication for this marriage to deliver and endure well enough
For a long time, it is an almost universally held view that a very wide majority of established big companies are slow innovators – while these were very disciplined in their execution , their ability to keep making game changing innovations were suspect. The innovation ethos inside large enterprises remains a goal worthy of pursuit. Sometime last year,John Seely Brown (JSB), John Hagel and Lang Davison published the results of a major research project, they have been conducting at Deloitte’s Center for the Edge. The Big Shift, a very insightful report that calls for immediate concerted action, highlights the deep rooted transformation that is pervading the global business. As one can easily spot out, last few decades of global business have been significantly influenced by advances in digital technologies amidst other major influencing factors.
The Big Shift brought out the fact the return on assets (ROA)of US companies,( this study looked at some 20,000 US companies) - a direct indicator of economic value add has been over a period of time in the last few decades progressively falling and is now hovering around 25% of what was recorded circa 1965. This is counterintuitive and paradoxical so to say. After all the general consensus is that the labor productivity has been raising and measured now , it is perhaps around twice the 1965 levels. So this begs the question why did this happen besides an appreciation of what and how the supposed benefits got lost in translation?
John Seely Brown, Johan Hagel and their teams came out with more than two dozen metric trackers that can be seen together to understand the massive shift that is happening in business which in turn contributed to the noticeable fall in rate of business value generation. With that as the background, the authors – John Seely Brown, John Hagel & Lang Davison have now attempted to look for solutions to overcome the slide and there they are here with the new book The Power of Pull: how small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion,
Traditional management techniques of centralized management in areas like planning , resource allocation, investments , branding , marketing etc are firm pillars on which the “push based management" is centered upon. The raison-d’être of the traditional firms lay in centralizing all planning and resource allocation to ensure the transaction costs within the system get optimized. Conventional management is so structured that the ability to create an environment of constant innovation and swifter response gets compromised as everything gets tied to a model of central planning and resource allocation – the actors in this model are also so aligned to this way of working – it requires a huge swathe of change to try anything different and the opportunity for optimizing this model is also getting very limited as it is in vogue for a long time – so scope for incremental innovation gets much harder and harder.
This can be best corroborated by the fact that the life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 has already fallen to less than fifteen years—down from 50-60 years around 1960. The authors predict that if these current trends continue, with no change in management, the life expectancy of Fortune 500 will fall to five years. Clearly, this can be attributed to the fact that at a certain point, the economic rot of the traditional organization will be clear to all , so much so that even traditional managers will be forced to embrace change, irrespective of their preferred way of work. Has this model delivered in terms of generating sustainable business value is the question that the authors asked as they began to investigate corporate performance of business in the last several decades.
In this business world of heightened global competition, the authors argue that the pace of change and buyer power inflicts enormous demands on enterprises and the basis of competition shifts from strengths centered on scalable efficiency to scalable collaboration. The span of influence of collaboration extends to hundreds and hundreds of participants in the “pull platform”. This is in contrast to techniques techniques like lean manufacturing which encompasses tighter integration amongst small number of select partners.
Let’s begin at the beginning. The book sees pull as the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.” “Pull, “gives us unprecedented access to what we need, when we need it, even if we’re not quite sure what‘it’ is. . . The power of pull provides a key to how all of us - individually and collectively - can turn challenge and stress into opportunity and reward as digital technology remakes our lives.” How’s this different. Let’s look at the push economy that has been in vogue for many many years. The book points out that “Push approaches begin by forecasting needs and then designing the most efficient systems to ensure that the right people and resources are available at the right time and the right place using carefully scripted and standardized processes. . . Push programs have dominated our lives from our very earliest years.”
From our education framework to institutional planning and execution, the authors point out were all centered on a push culture. Push was a suitable mechanism to support the industrial age companies performance characterized by incremental growth, hierarchical style of management in a deterministic world where correlation between yield and plan remained in a satisfactory state, The fading push economy had given way to a more dynamic world with more linkages showing more dynamic, complex and emergent behaviors. Dispassionate employees, disloyal customers, fast churning brands, dysfunctional governments all are clear indicators of this complex interplay.
Lets switch to the “pull model” The key premise in this model is that tapping the benefits of what is happening at the edges of organization and typically passionate and motivated employees and their networks make such things happen – the pull model leverages such participation and efforts. Deep performance improvements are made possible by embracing the pull model and this unleashes the power of individuals towards achieving such goals. The Power of Pull argues that the network effects of scalable collaboration can flip the experience curve and create what was unthinkable in traditional 20th Century management: an increasing performance improvement curve.
The Power of Pull is anchored on a framework that includes multiple dimensions in which interventions and initiatives happen and in their interplay comes out a very different mechanism of operation that encompasses business, process and people.
Some of those key levers of influence as identified by the authors include:
Access : the ability to fluidly find and get to the people and resources when and where we need them.
Attract : the ability to get resources and people wth right expertise both within and outside the enterprise.
Achieve : the ability to get results based on the partnership , collaboration , production leveraging amongst other things knowledge flows.
Within the achieve dimension, the book brings a new concept called “creation spaces”. These are defined as “environments that effectively integrate teams within a broader learning ecology so that performance improvement accelerates as more participants join.” These creation spaces “ . . . allow large numbers of participants, often in the millions, to come together to test and refine the practices required to master this third level of pull - achieving their potential more effectively.” “Although from a distance it may look like they are emerging spontaneously, self-organizing in response to the needs of the participants, a closer look reveals that creation spaces are carefully crafted by their organizers, especially in the early stages, to engage the right kinds of participants and foster specific types of interactions, all within environments that unleash the potential for increasing returns.” I like the emphasis the book makes on “Passion” of individual as cornerstone of their success. All these interplay at the individual, organization and network of organizations. The nature of interplay could range from “shaping views (direction or trajectory)”, “ shaping platforms (creates incremental values at individual, organizational and network wide)” and “shaping acts and assets ( interventions of rightly aligned resources)”.
Though the book may be short on real life examples that we can relate to, it is a very important body of work. We have to recognize that happenings in the edge (of the business ecosystem) may not be so obvious as we are accustomed to recognizing corresponding happenings at the core of the business ecosystem, The book succinctly argues that in this emerging 21st century economy, scalable mass collaboration brings together the people centered expertise and innovative ideas needed to address the very complex challenges, as well as the humongous opportunities all around us. This is hugely different from the last century model of mass production. The book convinces us that it is clear that our existing institutions, firmly rooted in the world of push, will require significant redesign in order to effectively harness the potential of pull. Institutional innovation - redesigning the roles, relationships and governance structures required to bring participants together in productive endeavors - will be a key requirement. In fact, the book argues that institutional innovation will trump either product or process innovation in terms of potential for value creation. Clearly this calls for well studied efforts to make this leap and I believe that The Power of Pull is one of the companions that shall help us navigate through this transition to conquer greater heights!
After a long time, I got the opportunity to read a new book, that I would have loved to read several years back aptly named – The Design Of Design. Several decades back, the onset of a discipline called software engineering started with a big problem of software project getting delayed inside IBM and Fred Brooks at the successful completion of the engagement came out with a seminal work – The Mythical Man-Month. Over the years I must have advocated reading the book to several hundred friends and colleagues at various points in time. Much like technology icons aka Bill Gates , Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin & Larry Page whom we keep referring to, the software engineering field has such icons – Fred Brooks stands taller than most others in the gallery of all time software engineering greats. Let’s look back a little – at a time when everyone thought computers were hardware and every decision revolved around this thinking, Fred Brooks created history with the publishing of Mythical Man-Month and virtually started the body of work called software engineering. This is a discipline that millions of engineers around the world have over time embraced, practiced and also advanced the state of the art and in many ways contributing to the growth of process, technology and business. It would be hard to find a well regarded software engineer not knowing or resonating to Brooks laws ‘adding more people to a late project makes it later’. I have heard comparisons between Moore’s Law in hardware engineering and Brook’s Law in software engineering.
Be that as it may , the context here is : Well now, 35 years later, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. has written another book, aptly titled The Design Of Design this time not about software in general but about design. Lets look at this : Design is at the core of things that influences everyone. If design is to be seen as “planning for execution or a build “, then most of us keep doing this at all the time – some may be more specialized – lets say designing the next generation smartphone to relatively more simpler cases. From designing garage at home to kitchen remodeling to design software, there are multiple patters of learning to distill which can be potentially leveraged across a wide domain of disciplines. Why do we need to focus on design now? Fred explains team designs are becoming complex artifacts and globally distributed teams, sophisticated computer models and most of the designers are divorced from implementation and end use.
The 400+ page book is distilled with wisdoms of design principles – it captures the essence of design learnings of six decades of Fred Brooks experience in design across as he brings out in five different media – computer architecture, houses, software, books and organization. It’s a revelation to me to know from the book that Fed Brooks wrote a paper on analytic design of automatic data processing systems in 1956 - much much(decades) before even I was born! Brooks says that he has tried to capture the invariants among the mental processes, human interactions, the iterations, the constraints etc. What a rich base of experience and a superlative effort to bring out the golden braid of thinking across time and space!
The case studies section of the book starts with this great quote: ‘In retrospect, most of the case studies have a striking common attribute: the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for much of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.’ One does not need to look beyond the success story of Apple to appreciate this.
I especially liked the essay called "What Is Wrong With This Process?" This is again popping the classical question – do you take a waterfall model or settle for an iterative design – This is often a question in every program that I get to provide executive oversight around the world. Passionate arguments on either side makes this a difficult situation to judge and I feel very relieved that Fred Brooks decides in favor of being on the iterative side: he points out that even if the goal were fixed and known … "design would still be iterative, because the constraints keep changing." His conclusion : "The waterfall model is wrong and harmful . we must outgrow it" . In an yet another revelation of a very powerful mind, Brooks brings out the the deep rooted support for waterfall model Is hinging on concepts like Herbert Simon’s Rational Model - supporters clamor for frozen design . Brooks comes down heavily on this approach pointing out that effectiveness is far more critical than embracing a simple process of building to frozen design.The section talking about design as a collaborative process is a fascinating read. Different perspectives for thinking about design, visions for designing houses, the role of individual design talent (process can't replace greatness!), and how great designers can be nurtured. In these, a discerning reader would notice the pearls of wisdom thrown in all around.
By taking a broader view of design, the book makes reading more interesting and the message appeal more wide. Each chapter in the book starts with various interesting quotes, and starts the first chapter with a quote from Francis Bacon:
[New ideas would come about] by a connexion and transferring of the observations of one Arte, to the uses of another, when the experience of several misteries shall fall under consideration of one mans minde.
In the collision of several thoughts and idea streams originate new ideas and it’s a fascinating journey that Fred Brooks takes us in the field of design with his rich tapestry of experience and a wide variety of annotated case studies. This is a journey of understanding – some may like all the ideas, some may like to disagree with a few but overtime things change but our persectives get more grounded when we begin to base our understanding and learning on wider and far rooted experiences such as brought out by Fred Brooks herein.I imagine most designers who read this book will be software developers and few will be involved in OS design or design of physical structures. Brooks would argue that there are universal ideas that really make design transcend particular design domains, and in that sense the cases studies he provides are certainly useful. Obviously, one needs to extend the ideas here to the context in which they operate. For example,the sudden lowering of the cost of collaboration brought by the internet represents revolutionary new kinds of creativity and problem‑solving. Overall, Brook's writing style is excellent, entertaining and thoroughly researched. Seen from this perspective, this is a great book for a reading club with computer scientists, architects, system thinkers and such experts across disciplines.
Google published the first ever “Google’s Economic Impact” report, which estimates that in 2009, Google generated $54 billion of economic activity for advertisers, publishers, and non-profit bodies in the United States. This is done using the AdSense & AdWords frameworks and delivered via paid search clicks, natural search clicks, AdSense revenue sharing, and Google Grants aka charitable donations. The report reveals that Google’s US revenue in 2009 was $11 billion; the $54 billion figure is Google's computation on how much value Google creates for its partners. The methodology used therein is quite a pioneering one, given that this is the first time that someone is attempting to assess the economic impact of online ads at this scale : the whole internet and who else is better qualified than Google to attempt this.
This is an interesting report, the implications of which will be felt more and more in the years to come. If we reason out that search engines (Google)are in many senses replacing displacing traditional media ad spends, it may be difficult to agree with Google’s $54 billion estimate for its direct economic impact but we have to concede a few things. This is a new growing media, the media, by nature brings in more participation from new class of users and one that may be potentially more ready to spend and the flexibility this provides to advertisers - they can cap daily ad spend and can look at in realtime extending or suspending ads based on clicks and reach. Google's report primarily depends on the assumption that clicks on natural results drive five times as many leads for businesses as clicks on paid results. However, we believe the indirect impact may be much much more.
I have seen estimates suggesting that Google's Traffic Acquisition Cost payments to US publisher websites, (as assessed by analysts) at about $3 billion, for an revenue of 11 billion dollars which is now being projected by Google to have an advertiser impact of about $50 plus billion. Lets look at the calculation : Google calculates the advertiser impact of its search service by assuming that for every dollar spent by an advertiser, the advertiser generates two dollars in sales (and one dollar in “sales minus marketing expense”, which the report calls “profits”) from consumers clicking on the purchased search result, and a further seven dollars in “profits” from consumers clicking on natural search results for the same advertiser, creating an 8X multiplier effect. Thus, claims the report, $7 billion in US-owned and operated revenue should drive $56 billion in economic impact
Now the difficult part: - Google says that businesses receive an average of five clicks on search results for companies as ads, and by its own conservative standards, estimates that search clicks are about 70 percent as commercially relevant and valuable as ad clicks, and thereby calculates that advertisers receive a total of eight times in surplus what they spend in AdWords. Look carefully here:
- Google assumes that people clicking on links are as inclined to purchase. Any benefit from link clicks has nothing at all to do with having ads. The two are separate events, and a company gets the benefit from search engine optimization and all the work of having a Web site, rapidly increasing the effective cost of using the ads.
- As the Jansen and Spink study states, “More than 80% of web queries are informational in nature and approximately 10% aretransactional, and 10% navigational.” This may lead one to think that the vast majority of clicks need not convert into sales (this is understandable) and so the impact may be less than what is assumed herein.
Thinking deep, it occurs to me it would be tough to embrace or discard Google’s estimated multiplier effect .As noted earlier, Google calculates the advertiser impact of its search service by assuming that for every dollar spent by an advertiser, the advertiser generates one dollar in “sales minus marketing expense” from consumers clicking on the purchased search result, and a further seven dollars from consumers clicking on natural search results for the same advertiser, creating an 8X multiplier effect. Google estimates that one dollar spent on search generates two dollars in advertiser sales via consumer clicks on paid search results. This assessment is centered on the methodology devised by Hal Varian, its Chief Economist, which in its core, assumes that advertisers are spending rationally to buy a certain keyword ranking rather than a higher or lower ranking, and then deriving the implied value which advertisers place on a click. I would think that this resonates well with my intuitive reasoning. Google estimates that one dollar spent on search corresponds to seven dollars in advertiser revenue via consumer clicks on natural search results.
Ideally , Google should have attempted a Lifetime Value assessment to derive the economic impact but rightfuly chooses to center these on transaction basis given the characteristics of the internet media and its limited lifespan. I talked to a few power users of these services (corporate and SMB) and find that for many interenet centric revenue generators, the proportion of their online centric revenue coming out of search engines on an average hover around upwards of 20% in their established and growing phase of business. The informal estimates from such sources point to 40-20-40 ratio - direct traffic,keyword centric and natural search referrals. For startups and early life enterprises, the ratio could be 25-35-40 pointing to a near 6X ratio. The swing across the range hovers between 4x to 6x ratio.
Without search engine, Google acknowledges advertisers would find other means of reaching consumers. We have to concede that search engines are not just merely capturing existing consumer spending rather they stimulate additional consumer spending(any online purchaser can vouch for this - they tend to buy more , owing to the dramatic increase in efficiencies and the smoothness of the operation). To be fair, Google’s true “economic impact” on a community should likely be measured in a way that balances the economic patterns it disrupts with the new-model of business it generates. Online ads and Google being the dominant player there are directly influencing the sale and retail mechanisms in a big way and are bound to increase their influence and hopefully, we will see the economic impact assessment methods improve a lot more along with the results.
Fellow Enterprise Irregular and a great friend Vinnie Mirchandani is coming out with a new book :The New Polymath - Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations, due for release last week of June 2010. He shared an early review copy with me for my reading – what a pleasurable and stimulating read it turned out to be. I was impressed with the theme of the book , the very powerful examples therein ( who won’t be impressed to look at the striking success of the likes of Apple, Google, General Electric and scores of others in other industries in a new light) and the recommended practices therein. The present era of mankind is seeing lot of excitement and promise all around. Around the world, everyday in our lives bring lot of changes – fast , unpredictable and may times we have to struggle hard to understand what the change stands for. Globalization, Technology has transformed the playing fields across continents, industries and sectors. Very powerful forces of change have shaken the beliefs in many aspects of governance and social thinking. Fortune 500 companies list is changing faster than the fast pace that we have seen in the past. Powerful brands have suffered huge damages and many industries have gotten transformed substantially so much so that many successful leaders today claim their business need to adapt and transform faster than ever. Leading edge corporations run faster in this direction to ensure that their rate of change inside is ahead of the change seen in their external environments. Looking at these developments, its clear that the time to re-imagine the future is now, and it is best done by a fresh school of thought that governs our thinking frameworks to enable a fundamental rethink and envision what is desirable and sustainable.
Now about the book: What does the term Polymath mean? Vinnie explains, “Polymath,” as in Greek for someone who excels in many disciplines, like Leonardo da Vinci, who was an artist, sculptor, architect, and so much more, Isaac Newton, the English physicist, astronomer, and philosopher, and Hypatia of Alexandria, who was a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and teacher Ben Franklin - author, journalist, scientist, inventor, political philosopher and statesman. In this book, Vinnie focuses on Polymath enterprises, who are setting out a strikingly successful path in business.
Vinnie, the quintessential polymath as defined in the book, starts by observing that for the most part today, most of us seem to specialize and highlights the fact that we are monomaths in a world of exploding knowledge and passionately argues for more and more polymaths to be nurtured both at the institutional and at personal levels. (Being a monomath is a direct teaching of many management thinkers of recent era – for example, as recently as in the last two decades, Jim Collins adopted Peter Drucker’s thinking and brought out in his book “Good to Great” that leaders need to think and act like hedgehogs , not foxes. Hedgehogs are more like monomaths and foxes are more like polymaths ). With monomaths around, Vinnie argues that many ecosystems are going through a phase aka the dark ages, where there was plenty of living, but there was little forward movement in terms of progress. It was defined by its relative “nothingness”. Drawing a parallel to the current time, he points out, in the information technology, there is lack of nutrition—so much of the spending is wasted. In sustainability, there is lack of agreement—there are so many rancors in spite of so many global concerns. In health care, it is about lack of availability—so much of the world does not have access to all the advances in technology—or even basic health care. The core of these problems Vinnie argues amongst others centers on monomath thinking and execution.
At the same , Vinnie brings out the modern day success stories of polymath enterprises and individuals and argues that in them he sees the potential to capitalize on the promise that future holds for business and mankind. He succinctly points out to the fact that well-designed enterprises are taking individual monomaths, leveraging a wide array of technologies and becoming the new polymaths. The good news is that as in the European Renaissance, there are plenty of polymaths that are around. Though a lot of attention these days seems to go to innovation in mobile and social technologies, plenty of complex, hairy “industrial innovation” is also going on. This is encouraging because we face a daunting series of challenges at the global, enterprise, and individual level. We need polymaths to help deal with a range of challenges – big and small, of various size and structures.
Let's looks at the new business that are shaping many emerging industries - The successful enterprises spanning established corporations to upcoming start-ups—are creating incredible value by succeeding in a new way: by bringing together various streams of technology (biotech, cleantech, healthtech, infotech,Nanotech etc) to create new form of processes, products and services to create value . These are the poster child of Vinnie’s definition of the New Polymaths.
What I see in the book are a rich set of examples and metaphors that talk the story of entrepreneurs, business leaders, and multinational companies innovatively leveraging technology to tackle big problems, “grand challenges,” related to health, hunger, and natural disasters—and, of course, information technology. In their own ways, these big and small enterprises in their spheres of influence are reshaping the world . Vinnie highlights that examples represent a range from a triangle to an eight sided octagon to a ten sided decagon to a twenty sided icosagon to a 50 sided pentacontagon! The “more-sided” polymaths are trying to solve the really big, hairy problems. The “fewer-sided” ones are a bit less ambitious, but they are helping us run our enterprises and lives much better. The book rightfully brings out the range, recognizing that we need a variety of such forms of organizations.
The easy to read book is structured into three parts :
Part I sets the stage for the challenges of today and opportunities for polymaths of today and profiles GE, a new polymath.
Part II is organized around an acronym—R-E-N-A-I-S-S-A-N-C-E—each letter of which discusses a building block for the new polymath to leverage.
Part III is focused on how helping you groom your own new polymath. It profiles the BP CTO group, its tools and processes, and its vast ecosystem of innovation ideas, besides bringing together common threads from the seven other polymath profiles and the 11 building blocks
Leaders who disrupt to succeed in business need a framework to navigate their way and Vinnie provides that through his key building blocks of the R-E-N-A-I-S-S-A-N-C-E framework (each letter is a chapter that discusses a building block for the New Polymath), we learn about 11 key ideas: Residence; Exotics; Networks (Bluetooth to broadband); Arsonists; Interfaces; Sustainability; Singularity; Analytics; Networks (social); Cloud Computing; and Ethics. He further brings in the ethics dimension and urges integrating this into the warp and weft of innovation that the Polymaths unleash. This is a nice read explaining the need for these changes and how to effectively leverage them for success.
Do all these things thing look theoretical? - No way!. Look at the rich examples that Vinnie is parading: Apple, Google, Salesforce.com et al... Marc Benioff in the preface to the book captures this very well.–“Being a Polymath isn’t that difficult—and it always yields multidimensional rewards”. One of my favorite in this book is the chapter on steps to becoming a polymath – and the book lays out the key steps to becoming a Polymath enterprise.
Vinnie’s closing comments captures the essence that if we add up all the personal interests and skills that do not show up in job descriptions, there are plenty of other modern-day, mainstream polymaths and urges business to craft the right blend of monomaths that can lead to running successful polymath enterprises. And that we need these polymaths to solve the world’s wicked problems that Aristotle and al-Tusi and Jefferson never even imagined. In Vinnie’s dream, in such a world, Michelangelo would propose a toast to the uomo universale, the Italian term for polymath, and invoke his contemporary, Leon Battista Alberti: “A man can do all things if he but wills them.”
When In Search Of Excellence got published in 1981, it was a time when every good business idea seemed to be born in Japan, and most did not appear transferable to the United States. That’s the time, Tom Peters & Robert Waterman, the authors of the book examined several successful American companies and detailed readily transferable attributes shared by most of them. It helped American executives look into the mirror and see that some of the things they were doing were not bad at all, that others were excellent, and that they could borrow excellent ideas from each other. That, in turn, paved the way for many wannabes to create successful business. With the examples showcased in The New Polymath, Vinnie is again demonstrating the extraordinary ways in which the New Polymaths of the American business are winning in the international arena – he tops it by laying a robust framework for others to get there. When we extend these concepts to new strata - the likes of the emerging world, the non profit institutions etc. the results shall turn out to be much more significant. A very important reference book for business, entrepreneurs, management students and all professionals who dream and are working to create a better world.
Sadagopan's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Trends,Thoughts, Ideas & Cyberworld "All views expressed are my personal views are not related in any way to my employer"
