Management
The situation was clear. The company had just brought in a new COO. That person was band-leader, intent on bringing a slew of folks from his last company. My friend Pete, who worked for the new COO, had strong track record of delivering results, but the internal rap on
Management
I first became interested in decision making more than a decade ago, back when I was running marketing at Business Objects. My interest was prompted by the evolution of taglines among BI vendors. In the early days, taglines were descriptive like First in Enterprise Decision Support or The Enterprise Data
Strategy
When asked why he won so many matches, chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer would reply: "all that matters on the chessboard is good moves." That is, winning is all about the moves. And moves, in turn, are all about the situation. Contrast this to today's Silicon Valley
Marketing
This post was inspired by a recent beer with long-term colleague, friend, and fellow volleyball dad, Paul Albright, now chief revenue officer at Marketo. The question we discussed was how can a company sell current product capabilities but also market vision at the same? (For brevity's sake
Silicon Valley
The first time I heard the word "pivot" in the context of business strategy was about nine months ago. As a student of language, my ears perked up when I heard it. I remember thinking, "pivot ... interesting, haven't heard that one before, ... strong buzzword potential,
Marketing
As a marketing guy turned CEO, I have the relatively rare experience of having seen marketing from inside the organization as well as from above it. Yesterday, the SV Forum Marketing SIG invited me to give a presentation where I discussed marketing from the CEO's perspective. I'
Management
While I've blogged before about Palantir Technologies (e.g., Beware the Spectacular B-Round Valuation), this will probably be my last post about them because, since leaving MarkLogic, I am no longer terribly involved in the Intelligence Community space nor engaged against them as an indirect competitor. I
Open Source
I had breakfast the other day with Mike Olson, CEO of Hadoop ecosystem leader, Cloudera. We met because we run in similar circles in data management land and because Mike had some quibbles with my post, The Open Source Software Paradox. My premise was that open source presents a fundamental
Management
Everyone’s aligned in a Silicon Valley startup, right? Give everyone some options so everyone has skin in the game and then everyone wants what’s best for the share price: one for all and all for one! Not so fast. In this post, inspired by a chat with longtime
Management
Building on on a post by 10gen's Max Schireson which in turn built on a post by me, I thought I'd have some fun by playing with and enhancing Max's taxonomy of technology senior executives. Max's theory is that a surprisingly number
Open Source
As a marketer, I'm a fan of open source software. After all, if you can't dislodge Microsoft from mid-range server operating systems, Microsoft Office from desktop productivity suites, or Oracle from relational databases -- and doing so through traditional means is a virtual impossibility -- then blowing
Management
I've always found business to have a fair amount of accidental, built-in hubris, largely resulting from the strategy formulation process. I remember one time at Business Objects we had a strategy offsite where, in our infinite wisdom and with a fair bit of groupthink, we came up
