Pressure Is On And Hopefully Growing Rapidly!

Friends, as we have discussed in the past many blogs, the pressure on enterprises to transform is not only real, but intensifying rapidly. Excellent! There was a good article discussing this recently on TechCrunch: The Pressure On Enterprises To Transform Intensifies Two major attributing reasons include: Thanks to Apple, Google and Amazon and a few…

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Five Things That Great VC’s Do = Five Things That Great CEO’s Should Do?

  Focus, reducing redundancy, avoiding pointless procedures, better utilization of time are equally applicable to enterprises as they are to start-ups. And, to VC’s as they are to CEO’s. I like the following article recently on TechCrunch- 5 Great Things That VCs Do because it: Cuts through the chase Holds people accountable for the important things…

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Innovation Strategy vs. Culture of Innovation

Here’s something to think about: Strategy vs. Culture when it comes to disruption and innovation in large enterprises. More and more of the large enterprises under duress and pressure from clients are trying to become more innovative. I would love to say that many are embracing the merits of mindful disruption, but from experience I would…

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Not Enough Inter-Preneurism? Not Just The CEO’s Fault

Note: A) In this blog the terms enterprises, corporation, large company are use interchangeably. B) Inter-preneurism is referred to as entrepreneurism inside a corporation. Fact: Corporations spend large sums of money on internal R&D – Internal R&D is entrepreneurial/risky. However, it is considered ‘focused’ experimentation. Fact: Enterprises take far bigger risks in external venture investments…

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Change and Large Enterprises

This Financial Times article by Hasso Plattner, Co-Founder of SAP caught my eye yesterday, while I was thinking deeply about the complications (difficulties) of executing ‘change’ in large enterprises. Fact: SAP is about as rigid of a company as you can imagine, and HANA, the in-memory-database concept which SAP introduced a few years ago, represents…

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Why We Need to Disrupt Corporate R&D Spending Patterns!

Firstly, I am extremely bullish on the innovation CAPACITY of large companies (enterprises). Let’s start with a fact: For most of the past three decades, investments made by the entire venture capital sector totaled less than the R&D and capital expenditure budgets of individual large companies such as IBM, GM, or Merck [Source: Architecture of…

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Disruption in Big Companies: Difficult? Yes. Impossible? NO!

Large enterprises (companies) become successful because they grow aggressively, globally and they are known to be ‘flawless’ in execution and delivery. This includes the largest computer hardware or software companies, pharmaceutical companies, consumer products good manufacturers, car manufacturers, aerospace and any/all in between. In order to run the very large human resources machinery, over the…

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Football AND Leadership in Tech Companies?

Wow! Whether you are a college football fan or not – I encourage you to watch the last 2 minutes of the Monday night football BCS title game on January 6th. What happened in the last half of that game and in particular the last one minute and 50 seconds is what should happen everyday!…

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Disrupting Corporate Ventures!

Why is it that we are NOT in awe of the corporate venture arms of multi-billion companies? Yet we remember large venture firms and what they have done! In my work with large enterprises and ProVoke, I am stunned as to how underutilized, over-protected and cautious the Corporate Venture arms of my clients are. Why…

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Corporate Human Intellectual Capital

Dilbert.com A key reason that I wrote my book ProVoke was to ignite and inspire the vast number of highly talented and intelligent individuals within large companies (knowledge workers). It pains me to see highly skilled individuals be stripped of the key reason for which they were hired: To express their talent. Instead we focus…

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