Transforming Organization Culture

This weekend I happened to watch a play by “Yours Truly Theatre” titled “Bhagwaan Dhoondo“, which loosely translated means “The Search for your Own God”. It was by all means an enthralling performance, which ended with a standing ovation from the audience. It was funny, thought provoking and entertaining throughout. What was most interesting thing about the play was that it was of a genre called “Interactive Theatre”, which is a kind of Improv theatre and has two parts to the play: The first part is rehearsed and performed by the actors. This part tells a story of the protagonist. It stops at a […]

Going from Products to Services

One of the biggest challenges that most product organizations face is to constantly innovate and be a step ahead of their competitors. Most of us tend to continue to remain in the boundaries of more features/functions or newer products, etc. Most of these changes will work for you for sometime, but soon your competitors will catch up. Then the whole cycle starts again. One way to break this cycle is to package your product into a service. Though this may seem a very simple idea, it is very difficult to execute. And precisely for this reason, the pay-off for this […]

To Transform your Organization, Give a Shit

One of the most difficult thing to do in a business as a CEO, is to successfully transform the business. The success rates of most of these transformation efforts show that most of these don’t succeed, which in my opinion is an understatement. Yet, a lot of CEO’s find themselves at a cross-roads, where they need to transform their organizations or see them remain a shadow of their past or in certain businesses, go out of business. There are a lot of industries that are going through such a transformational change. So, what would you do if you were a […]

Can CIO’s or CTO’s become Agents of Innovation or Transformation

Recently, Dan Burrus wrote a couple of blog post for HBR, where he expects that  CIO’s and CTO’s to embrace new roles within their organizations. He expects and the CIO’s should embrace the role of Chief Innovation Officer and CTO’s to embrace the role of Chief Transformation Officer. I do agree that this is an unprecedented opportunity, the current times requires organization to find ways to foster innovation, I don’t agree that every organization needs to start on a transformation journey. There are industries that are currently at the cusp of major transformations (Print media, automotive, retail). Organizations in these […]

The lure of large deals

If you are a sales leader, working in the software industry, you would know the importance that any organization places on the deal size. The bigger the deal size, the better it is for you. Right? WRONG! In my experience, really large deals (aka, multi-million dollar deals) rarely prove to be a success; for both the parties – buyer and seller. This sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but it really is true. When I think about why this is so, I came up with the following reasons because of which this is not good for the buyer: Typically, once such a deal […]