I’ve Got a Crazy Idea: How About We Focus on Next-Quarter’s Pipeline?
I’m frankly shocked by how many startups treat pipeline as a monolith. Sample CMO: “we’re in great shape because we have a total pipeline of $32M covering a forward-four-quarter (F4Q) sales target of $10M, so 3.2x coverage. Next slide, please.” Regardless of your view on the appropriate magic pipeline coverage number (e.g., 2x, 3x, 4x), […]
Blocking and Tackling
“Football is two things. It’s blocking and tackling. I don’t care about formations or new offenses or tricks on defense. You block and tackle better than the team you’re playing, you win.” – Vince Lombardi Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Just like in football, there is a perception that blocking and tackling has no glamor and it is beneath us […]
If Rebranding’s the Answer, What was the Question?
From time to time, every CMO faces a key question: to brand or not to rebrand? Often, it’s right after joining a company and you want to make a big splash. Sometimes, it’s after you’ve been with a company for a while and you and some told-timers are bored with the current branding and want […]
Dealing With Fear and Anxiety At Work
Over the last few days – I had multiple conversations about different aspects of anxiety in the work place . I also chimed in on a couple of threads in social media about it . So when I woke up today – I felt like I should share some thoughts about how I deal with […]
Things to Avoid in Selecting an Executive-Level Job at a Software Startup
This is a sister post to my recent one, Career Decisions: What to Look For in a Software Startup. That piece is all about what to look for when considering taking a job at a software startup. This piece is kind of the opposite: what to look out for when considering an executive job at a […]
Good CEO Habits: Proactively Update Your Board at the End of Every Quarter
I am surprised by how many startup CEOs leave the board hanging at the end of the quarter. As a CEO my rule of thumb was that if a board member ever asked me about the quarter then I’d failed in being sufficiently proactive in communications. In tight quarters I’d send a revised forecast about […]
HashiConf EU 2019: The Service Mesh push and Progressive Delivery
As enterprises commit to building microservices to enable greater software development velocity the market for infrastructure to manage and enable these microservices is beginning to mature. HashiCorp is ready to be a platform supplier for these tools, building on its existing beachheads, most notably Consul. That was pretty much my hot take from HashiConf EU […]
Epictetus and APIs
First page of Discourses by Epictetus Don’t set your heart on so many things,” says Epictetus. Prioritize. Train your mind to ask: Do I need this thing? What will happen if I do not get it? What if it all happens all at once? I return often to this quote, to the point of boring […]
Low code – how much of the promise can it really deliver ?
This blog you are reading is written on a “low code” system – it is a wordpress blog where I have not used any custom coding at all. I could have – and I am an experienced developer. And yet I chose to not even touch html or CSS because it works for my limited […]
A strictly personal take on multi cloud
This is one of those topics where my employer IBM has a vested interest and consequently I need to state upfront that what I say below is strictly my own views from my limited view of the large enterprise world. My personal experience over the last couple of decades has been in the very large […]
