Roger Mader

Money is fungible. Seek the best experience in the domain, function, industry and geography you prefer. Most importantly, choose the venue that promises a dedicated career mentor.

Back in 1999 I was traveling through Silicon Valley meeting with entrepreneurs, including an Oracle contact who told me about his vision for a “CRM in the cloud”. I’d never heard the term but found Marc Benioff’s label apt, descriptive and simple. If all terms used similar metaphors we wouldn’t need this conversation.

Consider all the other decentralized assets you employ. Do you house a power generation plant onsite rather than using the grid? Do you insist on your own sanitation plant, water services or private telephone transmission? All of these services benefit from the network effect of shared assets. Cloud computing is just the most recent devolution of owned to leased assets, with the same economic benefits.

The purpose of the organization describes a higher value, an intention to make the world a better place, to elevate the human condition. This provides your people with a guiding direction, it helps investors to make strategic rather than purely financial decisions, it attracts and retains the loyalty of devoted customers, employees and partners. Translate purpose to your contemporary objectives. “We intend to achieve the premiere market position in X, earning a reputation of Y, by Z target date.” To pursue your objective and promote your purpose, strategy poses two questions: where will we choose to compete, and how will we seek to win.

Don’t hypothesize. Empathize. The genius of human empathy? It allows you to dispense with assumptions. Best to stop hypothesizing and start learning the perceived reality of your actual audience. “So you find banking complex? Tell me about that!” Soon you’re exploring anxieties around savings, challenges of numeracy, insecurities about the future, hidden pains from childhood, dashed hopes amid inspired dreams, hopes and aspirations. The wonder of the human condition is that we all operate in our own unique contexts. By interrogating personal individual experiences you discover that your flawed assumptions would have slowed you down, led you astray, or produced the wrong solution to a problem you only belatedly came to understand.

One of the breakthroughs in innovation, "platform design", works on the principle of integrating IP from multiple partners on a foundational platform or framework. Boeing and Airbus both employ this method in the complex technologies of their large airframes, with dozens of companies contributing hundreds of components, all protected a valued as proprietary intellectual property. China by contrast has become notorious among Western manufacturers for failing to honor IP and outright copying patent-protected components. This devalues the original product and demonstrates by counter-example the value of IP and the cost of its usurpation.