Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans — you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.

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Insight

Great conductors are known to be supremely confident: in their technique and in themselves. You can see the confidence when you watch video clips of giants like Mengelberg, Toscanini, Furtwangler, Kleiber, or Bernstein. Moreover, you sense their confidence when you listen to an audio recording of theirs: they are sure-footed with each and every note in the symphony they are conducting.

Mobile devices and cloud computing continue to redefine basic concepts of IT and challenge the concepts taken for granted over the preceding decades. One of the issues in ferment today is that of defining access and providing secure and differential availability of computing resources to users as needed.

Many years ago I served as the Chairman of the Privacy, Confidentiality and Security Committee of what is now the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO).

In my last Advisor (see "Can You Be 'Too Agile'?"), we considered the question: "Is it possible to be too Agile?" The question itself is a sign of Agile's successful adoption by businesses and their development teams.

Most of the news regarding privacy and wearable computers and camera-equipped devices like Google Glass has focused on the rights of individuals when it comes to being recorded in public places or commercial establishments like bars and restaurants.

The question is: do we need standards for performance measures? I've long opposed the request for canned measures and championed the use of personalized metrics. Your metrics should answer your root questions and fulfill your specific needs. However, I also teach that metrics are built from measures. It's these performance measures that would greatly benefit from a common language.

Social media monitoring excels when it comes to gathering rich customer feedback because consumers tend to elaborate when discussing products and services on social media networks and online forums.

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software.