Dave Kellogg
CEO, HostAnalytics, a leader in cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM).
Previously Dave was SVP/GM of Service Cloud at Salesforce , CEO at MarkLogic and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as it grew from $30M to over $1B. See Dave's disclaimers at Kellblog.
Are You a “Challenging” or Simply a “Difficult” Direct Report?
Most managers, save for true sycophants, want to challenge their boss. Few managers want to be puppet yes-people to the boss. They’ve worked hard to get where they are. They bring years of wisdom and experience. They want to push and challenge. But many don’t know when or how. More importantly, they don’t know what […]
Simple Rules to Make It Easier To Build Your Startup’s Board Deck
As someone who has assembled many startup board decks over the years, I thought I’d offer some advice to executives who contribute slides to board decks that should make it easier for the point-person to assemble, improve the deck’s appearance, and avoid any painful and/or embarrassing mistakes in the process. Marketing folks, who both build […]
The SaaS Rule of 40
After the SaaSacre of early 2016, investors generally backed off a growth-at-all-costs mindset and started to value SaaS companies using an “appropriate” balance of growth and profitability. The question then became, what’s appropriate? The answer was: the rule of 40 [1]. What’s the rule of 40? Growth rate + profit should be greater than or […]
Detecting and Eliminating the Rolling Hairballs in your Sales Pipeline
Quick: what’s the biggest deal in this quarter’s sales pipeline? Was that the biggest deal in last quarter’s pipeline? How about the quarter before? Do you have deals in your pipeline older than your children? If you’re answering yes to these questions, then you’re probably dealing with “rolling hairballs” in your pipeline. Rolling hairballs are […]
How to be Passionate without Being Self-Righteous
I can easily think of a dozen cringe-worthy times in my career when I look back and say, “wow, I must have appeared to be a self-righteous idiot when I said thing X.” Let me thank anyone on the receiving end of those statements for their patience. I now get it; I understand. Look, I’m […]
Is IBM Getting Out of Enterprise Performance Management?
I noticed that IBM sold off several EPM products — IBM Cognos Disclosure Management (CDM), IBM Cognos Financial Statement Reporting (FSR), and IBM Clarity 7 products — to a company called Certent. This, combined with a pretty weak performance in Gartner’s recent financial and strategic CPM magic quadrants — where IBM landed as Visionary and […]
A Look at the Tintri S-1
Every now and then I take a dive into an S-1 to see what clears the current, ever-changing bar for going public. After a somewhat rocky IPO process, Tintri went public June 30 after cutting the IPO offering price and has traded flat thus far since then. Let’s read an excerpt from this Business Insider […]
The New 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrants for Cloud Strategic CPM (SCPM) and Cloud Financial CPM (FCPM) – How to Download; A Few Thoughts
For some odd reason, I always think of this scene — The New Phone Book’s Here – from an old Steve Martin comedy whenever Gartner rolls out their new Magic Quadrants (MQ) for corporate performance management (CPM). It’s probably because all of the excitement they generate. Last year, Gartner researchers John Van Decker and Chris […]
The Strategy Compiler: How To Avoid the “Great” Strategy You Couldn’t Execute
Few phrases bother me more than this one: “I know it didn’t work, but it was a great strategy. We just didn’t have the resources to execute it.” Huh. Wait minute. If you didn’t have the resources to execute it, then it wasn’t a great strategy. Maybe it was a great strategy for some other […]
Blocking the End Run: Eleven Words to Reduce Politics in Your Organization
People are people. Sometimes they’re conflict averse and just not comfortable saying certain things to their peers. Sometimes they don’t like them and are actively trying to undermine them. Sometimes they’re in a completely functional relationship, but have been too darn busy to talk. So when this happens, how do you — as a manager […]
