Innovation or Acquisition

As leaders of an organization, one is always confronted with the need to constantly find avenues of growth to keep their share holders happy. If you are leading one such organization, you are also constantly grappling with the question about where could the next level of growth come from. Do you have innovative products or services in your portfolio which can lead you to the next level of growth? If you are like most of your counter-parts, you usually find out that your innovation pipeline doesn’t look very lucrative when it comes to high growth products or services. Then you […]

PBTO24: What’s the Measure of a Sales Managers Success

One of the most important pillar of building a high performing sales team, is the performance of your sales managers. So, how do you evaluate the performance of a sales manager? If your organization is like most of the sales organizations, the answer is very simple – Does he hit his sales quota? Sales organizations function like a clear top-down organization. The sales VP or CSO or whatever he is called gets a quota (based on the CEO’s commitment to the stock market or to the board members and investors), say $100 Million. He then adds a cushioning factor and […]

Everyone wants to innovate but no one wants to fail

Every organization, small or large is talking about innovation to be developed as a key strength within their organization. Every organization has an innovation program running at some maturity, but nothing really breakthrough comes out of these innovation programs. So, what’s wrong? Every organization wants to innovate, but no organization wants to fail People do not remember (everyone knows but conveniently forgets) that not all innovation projects will succeed and there is very little that you can do to forecast which one’s will in fact succeed. In that sense, i think innovation projects are like the Movie business and there is a […]

Why I consider Marissa Meyers decision a step in the right direction for Yahoo!

There has been enough being said about Marissa Meyer’s memo to all Yahoo employees about asking all employees to report to work in office and not work remotely. Most of the media and other leaders in the industry have gone on record saying that this is a step back into the past for Yahoo! Most have shared statistics about the higher productivity that people have been reported among people working from home or remotely and how other organizations are fostering creativity and encouraging more people to work remotely. I, however, agree that this is a step in the right direction […]

Idea for a disruptive biz-model innovation for banks

There is a lot of discussions and activities around the revival of the good old ATM. Some are trying to make these machines more Customer-centric like Wells Fargo. Some are trying to improve the overall user experience of the ATM like Diebold. However, the true question should be the following: “Do we even need an ATM? Is there a better, easier, faster way to manage cash than via an ATM?” The first bank to figure out the answer to this question has the potential to truly disrupt the banking industry from a cash management perspective. One way that I think could be […]