MBA Learning Teams and Playing in Position

It has been interesting contrasting a day to day work environment with my MBA learning team as we work through a new venture group project.....

One thing has become very obvious. Anybody that believes that there is automatically a common agenda because people work together, in a working environment, is potentially making a serious error of judgement.  Working inside my learning team has taught me a couple of things.

5 Lessons for Product Practitioners from Steve Jobs

As the world reflects on the passing of Steve Jobs, it inevitably triggers some thinking about lessons learned and the legacy of learning's that he leaves behind.  Here is my list of Jobs'isms, which I am sure is just one of many.

• Keep it simple
• Believe in what you are doing
• Love your product
• Failure is simply another step towards success
• Release your product when it is ready - not before.

Product managers generally understand that curve balls are going to come at them constantly.  Print out these 5 ideas, and stick them up somewhere - it will be a simple reminder to keep you on track.
I am currently working through the implementation of a new strategy, a portfolio repositioning and a new product development kickoff (all @ the same time), these 5 key principles coupled with understanding WHY (see previous post), has been absolutely key to keeping focused on the key objectives at hand.

Think Different

There are not many occasions when somebody passes that you have never met, 

has had a huge influence on what you use, 

has inspired you to strive for more, 

has taught that failure is simply another lesson on the path to success,

and has brought a smile each time you consider his achievements.

RIP Steve Jobs, you touched so many ....

You only have a Scale of 1: Why org's should consider cloud solutions

Recently there have been a number of occasions when I have been asked to explain what the potential benefits are for an enterprise organisation of a "cloud" deployment over a typical enterprise CPE (customer premises equipment) deployment.   There is so much hype, and marketing generated positioning that tries to pretend that it is a complex value proposition, where in reality the answer is fairly simple ... simple common sense I think.

Firstly, the value proposition for "cloud" and its potential benefits are not complex (that does not necessarily mean that the techniology underneath is not); and secondly the difference between an in-house controlled CPE deployment and a cloud based deployment can simply be articulated as one of scale.  If one is deploying an in-house CPE solution, no matter how small or large the organisation, the only economy of scale benefit that can be gained is directly related to the size of your organisation .. the level of aggregation is always 1.