7 Things Great Leaders Do Every Day

 7 Things Great Leaders Do Every Day

1. Communicate the state of things
2. Form actionable plans
3. Develop resources
4. Develop people
5. Trust the process
6. Show appreciation and exude kindness
7. Look forward

Refer: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/367677 

SaaS Business Strategy - Do's and Don'ts

 SaaS Business Strategy - Do's and Don'ts

https://caseyaccidental.com/saas-marketplace/

https://caseyaccidental.com/marketplace-types

https://caseyaccidental.com/platform-types

Why Digital is The Future! How to have a successful journey...

Why Digital is The Future! How to have a successful journey...

"Digital" and "digitization" or "online" has become a very common word in the recent past due to the C-19 pandemic situation, and yet, the digital transformation has been there in every industry more than two decades or so to create value-driven business opportunities for the organizations in their served customer segments with the right value proposition to fulfill their internal and external customers with amazing customer experiences (CX).

Some basics to know- The average IT spend across all industries was around 8 percent of their revenues as a magic number and yet it depends on many factors like industry, region, and age of the company, etc. Now, think about organizations spending between 4 to 24 percent based on the industry for their IT or digital goals, wherein the staff of IT and CIO or CDO would be bringing seamless and easy to use tools and solutions for the various businesses including sales and markets and other business functions in the company (plus external customers too). 

On a side note, usually, companies spend roughly around 10 percent as a magic number on sales and marketing, with a disclaimer that it depends on the size of the company and which sector it belongs to, etc.

With that, it's very imperative that you as a CTO or CDO or CIO or Digital IT Head need to have a very clear plan to create a successful journey towards it with the available budgets in place... 

Some of the key caveats for the success of any organization to become truly digital are:

• Make sure to address the five domains of the digital strategy - customers, competition, data, innovation, and value
• Create a comprehensive digital platform with digital products, and not siloed or isolated apps or customizations
• Start with small to focus more on the CX, and then slowly evolve and improvise your design
• How fast you pivot to digital is the clear caveat to bring more efficiencies and value to your businesses and their respective functions
• Have a clear business architecture and enterprise architecture in place whenever your organization do any M&As and adapt as quickly as possible so that all the respective fulfillment happens seamlessly for the existing (for example, legacy apps) and newly acquired customers
• Application and/or software modernization with the latest emerging technologies like microservices, cloud, machine learning, artificial intelligence, monitoring, cybersecurity, etc
• IT architecture is very important to any organization, and yet, that needs to be refined every now and then to meet your business outcomes and demands
• Having an application rationalization chart to know the right sunset and sunrise digital products based on your organization priorities so that it is easier to maintain and innovate faster while the systems and applications are co-existing with newer digital products; a clear winner to achieve improvements in business operations
• Always, treat your data as the biggest asset to your organization to do any sort of transformation and decision making
• Make sure to have highly available, reliable, and accurate data APIs/Services for the key source of truth from the various data stores, these can be called as DaaS (Data as a Service) to ease accessibility and minimize the data issues
• A robust operational backbone is necessary but that certainly is not sufficient for an organization's digital future, an organization needs to adapt to the newer technologies and have to innovate faster to create newer digital products or try to leverage existing newer COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) tools to create newer digital solutions to continue delight and address all of your customer behaviors
• Always, have shared data analytics or insights from the data that you have collected from customers
• Re-use, Re-design, and Re-create wherever and whenever required to save time and money
• Have intelligent automation in place for automating some/many of the most used business processes
• Promote continuous delivery and/or integration with DevOps and SRE (Site reliability engineering) principles, so that feedback loops/cycles are faster and teams can implement and address them in a nimble fashion
• Promote co-creations and co-ownerships with the right internal and external accountability frameworks with faster pace decision making and approvals etc
• "digital" is everyone's job to become truly a digital organization. For example, to have the right business owners or product owners and then create more collaborative and agile ways of working together to reduce risks and dependencies
• Try to create a mindset where the customer is more important than anything, and providing seamless customer experience matters a lot
• Treat your tech debt as an innovation aspect of the digital journey, and have the organizational culture as design thinking instead of leaner thinking to come up with innovative digital solutions
• Having a digital product mindset instead of a project mindset
• Also, an organization can focus mostly on their core foundations and innovation only by having a great powerful external partner and/or developer community who gives you early feedbacks and promote your organization with ever scaling digital platforms
• Have resiliency aspects in your planned mission-critical releases, plan very well for the unplanned occurrences, and have architecture design for the next billion users

References/books:

Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution

Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success (Management on the Cutting Edge)

Why Digital Transformations Fail: The Surprising Disciplines of How to Take Off and Stay Ahead

The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

https://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Architecture-Strategy-Foundation-Execution/dp/1591398398

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/digital-transformation-books/

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/4-trillion-in-tech-spending-in-2019-heres-where-the-money-is-going.html

https://vtldesign.com/digital-marketing/content-marketing-strategy/percent-of-revenue-spent-on-marketing-sales/

https://www.flexera.com/blog/elo/2020-state-of-tech-spend-it-spending-benchmarks-and-trends/

https://www.flexera.com/blog/industry-trends/it-spending-by-industry/

https://blog.techvera.com/company-it-spend

The Five Competitive Forces that shape the Strategy

 

The Five Competitive Forces that shape the Strategy

Force 1: Bargaining power of customers

Force 2: Bargaining power of suppliers

Force 3: Threats of new entrants

Force 4: Threats of substitutes

Force 5: Rivalry among competitors

The Go-Giver vs. The Go-Getter

 Context

I have recently read the following books and trying to compare here between The Go-Giver vs. The Go-Getter with respect to life, business, and relationships, etc...

By the way, both are amazing and mind-blowing nice reads with a different perspective on life, relationships, and especially on the businesses, etc. and yet, I wanted to share here the key takeaways and the impressive changes one can make to their perspectives.

The Go-Giver

The Go-Giver talks more about others than you/yourself in a given situation, and presses more on the following 5 laws.

1. The Law of Value — Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.
2. The Law of Compensation — Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.
3. The Law of Influence — Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.
4. The Law of Authenticity — The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.
5. The Law of Receptivity — The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.

Here are the 3 most inspiring lessons about focusing on others more than yourself:

1. Develop a go-giver mentality to initiate your journey toward unimaginable success and enjoyment in what you do.
2. Product improvements have limits, but the power of improving customer experience is infinite.
3. Being authentic is the foundation for people having a positive experience with your business that will have a lasting impact on those you serve.

The Go-Getter 

The Go-Getter talks more about you to hustle and focusses more on the motto of ''it shall be done!" and "getting things done!" along with a lot of emphasis on "your own faith" to achieve success.

Here are the 4 most inspiring lessons about focusing on yourself than others while hustling:

1. Believe in yourself
2. Act with determination
3. Don’t take “No” for an answer
4. Tell yourself “It Shall Be Done.”

Final take: 

Both go-getter and go-giver are important in anyone's career, business, and life, etc. The go-getter is good for the short term for a  limited span of network with their accomplished successes but not for the long term, whereas the go-giver with the right mix of more authenticity and overall positive experiences to a cause works very well for the long term with elevated successes and happiness for broader networks. Especially, the go-giver works well for maintaining long-lasting relationships. Also, the go-givers do more sales than the go-getters in any business. In a logical way, one has to work like a go-giver but that doesn't mean that go-getters are bad, here the main perspective to understand is go-giver is an old-time go-getter and revolutionized and transformed as go-giver at heart, but one's mind acts like go-getter only to get the shit done.

Sources:

The Go-Giver

https://www.amazon.com/Go-Giver-Little-Story-Powerful-Business-ebook/dp/B0010O922C

http://goodinfection.com/summary-the-go-giver-bob-burg-john-david-mann/

https://lifeclub.org/books/the-go-giver-bob-burg-and-john-david-mann-review-summary

The Go-Getter

https://www.amazon.in/Go-Getter-Peter-B-Kyne/dp/9382677399/ref=pd_lpo_14_t_0/259-1999838-9711601?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=9382677399&pd_rd_r=eeeb331e-6faa-4307-b68a-c527305ddb36&pd_rd_w=pjvJQ&pd_rd_wg=ZX5TM&pf_rd_p=5a903e39-3cff-40f0-9a69-33552e242181&pf_rd_r=MJDNQT6HW1Y23AR38V0E&psc=1&refRID=MJDNQT6HW1Y23AR38V0E

https://www.jeffprewitt.com/the-go-getter-book-review/

Collection of Business Strategy and Consumer Technology Strategy writings

 Collection of Business Strategy and Consumer Technology Strategy writings at one place

https://sriramk.com/strategy

https://iqfystage.blob.core.windows.net/files/CUE8taE5QUKZf8ujfYlS_Reading+1.4.pdf

The above links have most specific on Consumer Tech, and then a general collection of learnings and tools on Business Strategy

Helping your business truly win with DevOps, IT Apps and Agile

Helping your business truly win with DevOps, IT Apps and Agile

This small scribble is all about a book named "The Phoenix Project" with summary notes and key takeaways...

• How can you think your department as a production factory with a lot of agility
• How fast you can make the changes to the failures so that business can run and win
• How can we continually learn something from an existing system by putting tension into it
• How seamlessly we can plan unplanned work like any other planned project activities; and once done with them, we need to see how can we completely get rid off them completely
• How can we have parallel projects and programs which can benefit businesses

Sources:

https://itrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/files/PhoenixProjectExcerpt.pdf

https://www.magnusdelta.com/blog/2017/9/16/thephoenixprojectsummary

https://medium.com/@lopamudramisra/the-phoenix-project-summary-4fdfbabba318

Business and Strategy tools in one place

Most common frameworks, methods, and tools for tackling Business and Strategy

Context

Often times, whenever I work on solving business problems I need to do a lot of research and collect data related to that business acumen first. Then, I would be needing more tools (or ready-made templates) to follow and refine again and again until I solve. 

Some of the most used and very helpful during those exercises are:-

PESTLE Analysis to come up with the external factors to your business domain https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/pest-pestel-analysis.html

Porter's Five Forces to come up with intensity of competition https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/porters-five-forces.html

Benchmarking to compare inside and outside of other performing products or service offerings in the business domain https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/benchmarking.html

Competitive Profile Matrix (CPM) to compare with your competitors and show strengths and weaknesses https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/competitive-profile-matrix-cpm.html

GE McKinsey Matrix to let you know where or which one to invest in among multiple businesses portfolio https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/ge-mckinsey-matrix.html

SWOT Analysis is to identify what are the strengths and weaknesses and their opportunities along with the threats https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/swot-analysis-how-to-do-it.html

VRIO Framework to come up with the sustained competitive advantage and their unique selling propositions https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/vrio.html

McKinsey 7s Model is a tool to do analyze a firm’s organizational design by looking at 7 key internal elements: strategy, structure, systems, shared values, style, staff, and skills, in order to identify if they are effectively aligned and allow the organization to achieve its objectives or not https://strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/mckinsey-7s-model-framework.html

Business Model Canvas for creating new business models and opportunities https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas and https://canvanizer.com/choose/business-model-canvases

The Value Proposition Canvas to create customer profiles, the value that you create with your business, and achieve the product-market fit https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/value-proposition-canvas

The NABC value proposition to come up with Needs, Approach, Benefits, and Competition https://www.innovationcanvas.ktn-uk.org/resources/value-proposition-nabc and https://web.stanford.edu/class/educ303x/wiki-old/uploads/Main/SRI_NABC.doc