Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

It's all about the money! This is one of most common ideas in the minds of enterprise executives. It is one of the tenets that has driven enterprises for decades because, well ... of course, businesses want to make money. Although this is true, that doesn't mean the company and its products or services need to be cost-driven.

¡Se trata del dinero! Esta es una de las ideas más comunes en la mente de ejecutivos empresariales. Es uno de los principios que han dirigido empresas durante décadas porque, bueno... por supuesto, los negocios quieren hacer dinero. Aunque esto es cierto, no quiere decir que la empresa y sus productos o servicios necesitan ser basados en costo.

Apple continues to make waves with the iPad and the iPhone. The iPad is probably already a US $2 billion line of business in a scant 80 days. Name another product that generated so much revenue so fast. I am finding how Apple pulled off that feat to be a more significant lesson in the design and engineering of a businesses than the glitz and splash of the iPad usability.

Cloud computing continues to gain momentum as a description of service offerings based on a virtualized data center infrastructure and provided over the Internet on an as-needed basis. Public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, first brought attention to this model, followed by private clouds built within an organization, as exemplified by IBM's Blue Cloud initiative.

Have you ever watched the reality TV series Survivor? Many countries around the world have produced variants of it, but essentially they all deal with a small group of mostly young people secluded on an isolated island trying to survive.

The evolution of information and communications technology made the exchange of information between people become more comfortable, simple, and fast. However, there are still traditional services that experience large difficulties in profiting from some of the advantages offered by this evolution, and postal services are a perfect example.

Sports broadcasting is an industry that does not wait for competitors to vet new technology; rather, it rushes to use new technology, and by doing so, creates a more innovative product -- a uniquely compelling, highly rated broadcast.

There's a brand-new layer of digital intelligence being conceived on the world's century-old electric power grid by way of your regional electric power utility, through your new smart meter, and extending into your future home and business energy-management systems and smart appliances. It's called the Smart Grid.

Here's how the Electric Power Research Institute defines it: