Aligned to Achieve: A B2B Marketing Classic
Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin’s Aligned to Achieve came out yesterday and it’s a great book on an important and all too often overlooked topic: how to align sales and marketing. I’m adding it to my modern SaaS executive must-read book list, which is now: Aligned to Achieve by Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin Customer Success […]
The Building Blocks of Digital Transformation: Community, Tech, Business Models, and a Change Platform
I’ve been making the argument lately that the single largest obstacle in successful digital transformation is change itself. Surprisingly, the arrival of new technology is generally not the large hurdle to becoming more digital in a meaningful way, though it certainly represents a large and growing learning curve. Yet learning the new technology is manageable […]
More Evidence Online Community is Central to the Future of Work
Within the last month, two new industry reports have been released that shed important new light on how we’re going to be organizing and operating our organizations in the coming years. Many of you know my point of view in this regard: Social technology has at this point largely transformed the consumer world, yet the […]
Myths of the Headless Company
In the past year or so, two of our competitors have abruptly transitioned their CEOs and both have perpetuated a lot of mythology about what happens and/or will happen in such transitions. As someone who’s run two startups as CEO for more than a combined ten years, been the “new guy” CEO twice after such transitions, sat […]
Restructuring the C-Suite for Digital Business: The Future of the CMO, CCO, CIO, and CDO
I’ve noticed lately what appears to be an emerging trend in marketing and communications leadership in some large companies. Specifically, the positions of chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief communications officer (CCO) are sometimes being consolidated into a single role, even in very large enterprises. Such consolidation has already happened at PG&E, Walgreens, and Citi, […]
How Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence Are Evolving the Digital/Social Experience
Digital engagement is once again shifting, as we can see from the main discussions at Facebook’s F8 conference this week about the new release of Messenger and its smart chatbots, or when we look at what’s happening with popular team messaging services like Slack, which is being “overrun by friendly, wonderful bots.” While bots seem […]
The Long Game is Winning in Digital Ecosystems, and Other Global Tech Trends
I’ve traveled nearly 70,000 miles all over the world since the beginning of the year, talking with digital practitioners in the trenches. Most often these are passionate but often frustrated change agents, IT managers grappling with tech evolution, and corporate leaders on both the technology and business side looking towards their futures and feeling uncertain. […]
Dear IT Department, Why Community Management Matters
It’s one of the curiosities of enterprise technology: Despite collaboration and engagement being an exclusively human activity — even when augmented and improved by digital tools — it’s the IT department that most often gets put in charge of rolling out said tools and then operating them long term. According to recent research by the […]
The Gang of Four and why “there is nothing equitable about equity in a digital age”
As a companion piece to my last post about the irresistible rise of mobile changing the face of the technology landscape, this piece looks at the big four companies that are succeeding there, but also the volatility and strange logic of the market, even for big social media brand names that are in the thick […]
The Hardest Lesson of Digital Transformation: Designing for Loss of Control
It goes hand in hand with another key principle that sets digital strategy well apart from many other traditional ways of achieving organizational objectives. One of the counterintuitive lessons of digital and social business is that the network itself can and should do the majority of the work, if you’ll only build a little social […]
