Strategy
I've always loved emergent strategies for many reasons: * They're practical. You invest in what works as opposed to what leadership wants to work. * I've seen too many strategy offsite white-board, created-in-a-vacuum strategies fail. * The premise that genius is not in
Management
Sunday's New York Times had a fascinating article about (American) football entitled Coaches Take More Risks, But Perhaps Not Enough. I've always believed that business managers are too conservative for two reasons: * They are rewarded for plan performance, not absolute performance. (See Beyond Budgeting for more
Management
If I had a dollar for every time a venture capitalist said "world-class," I could start my own venture fund. But rather than dismissing world-class as a tired cliché, in this post I'll spend a few minutes trying to understand what VCs mean when
Management
I found this post by Stanford evidence-based management professor Robert Sutton and tweeted about it earlier today. But since it's so good, I decided to do a post about it along with some commentary. First, here are the twelve things: 1. I have a flawed and incomplete
Marketing
Pioneering a new market and introducing an innovative technology in the process invariably results in customer confusion, usually driven by a fairly predictable "I've never seen one of those before" reaction: * What is a relational database and why would I need one when IMS is doing
See EMC's press release on the deal here. First, some takeaways from the press release and related coverage: * All cash transaction, valuation undisclosed. See below for some fun and math, trying to guestimate it from standard ratios. * Greenplum had raised $61M in venture capital. * EMC intends to create
Management
The ability to see both sides of an issue is a critical executive skill. Yet, in typical corporate America culture, that skill is all too often lost. Why? * Things get partisan: sales wants X, marketing wants Y, finance wants Z. * Discussions turn blame-oriented. Instead of working to solve problems,
VC
Visualization tools startup Palantir announced a follow-on financing round yesterday, raising $90M at a claimed $735M valuation. Since most people aren't familiar with either finance or VC math, this can generate confusion so I thought I'd do a post explaining a few things. The first
We are in the middle of one of our periodic analyst tours at MarkLogic, where we meet about 50 top software industry analysts focused in areas like enterprise search, enterprise content management, and database management systems. The NoSQL movement was one of four key topics we are covering, and while
Entrepreneurship
One of the things that irritates me about Silicon Valley culture is its blatant ageism. I dislike it for several reasons: * Let's start with the easy one: it's illegal. As an employer you should be looking for someone qualified to do the job, not someone of
Marketing
Dear Marketer: I get about 5 of these emails a day. Dear Dave, Hope you are doing great. Damco has vast experience in providing high quality and cost effective data processing services to its clients globally. Since its inception in 1996, Damco has honed its level of expertise and built
Databases
We generally refer to MarkLogic Server as an XML server, which is a special-purpose database management system (DBMS) for unstructured information. This often sparks debate about the term "unstructured" and the information continuum in general. Surprisingly, while both analysts and vendors frequently discuss the concept, the Wikipedia
