Quotes About Strategy

Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there's little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there's not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So,

We need to focus on the riskiest changes," I continue. "The 80/20 rule likely applies here: Twenty percent of the changes pose eighty percent of the risk.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. To do that, you need to know what matters to the achievement of the business objectives, whether it's projects, operations, strategy, compliance with laws and regulations, security, or whatever.

You're right that you can't achieve the strategic until you've mastered the tactical,

We are clueless about what our customers want! We have too much product that will never sell and never enough of the ones that do.

When you spend all your time firefighting, there's little time or energy left for planning.

I want to migrate us to MySQL and open-source databases wherever we can, because I'm tired of sending millions of dollars each year to an abusive vendor.

The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.

we can only win by innovating and understanding our customers, which we can only do by mastering data.

We all know the threat the company faces is real, she thinks. The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.

You can't just throw the pig over the wall to us, and

As part of the First Way, you must gain a true understanding of the business system that it operates in.

IT is not just a department. IT is a competency that we need to gain as an entire company.

High touch marketing requires high tech. But if there's so many of us assigned to these Marketing projects,

When r&d capital is locked up as wip for more than a year, not returning cash back to the business, it becomes almost impossible to pay back the business,

You know what your problem is?" Erik says, pointing a finger at John. "You never see the end-to-end business process, so I guarantee you that many of the controls you want to put in aren't even necessary.

I've figured out that the trick to a long career in IT Operations management is to get enough seniority to get good things done but to keep your head low enough to avoid the political battles that make you inherently vulnerable.

Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they're in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license."†

Picture this scenario: You are in an organization where everyone is making decisions, solving important problems every day, and teaching others what they've learned," Erik says. "Your adversary is an organization where only the top leaders make decisions. Who will win? Your victory is inevitable.

While we're dreaming big dreams here, let me say this," he continues. "In ten years, I'm certain every COO worth their salt will have come from IT. Any COO who doesn't intimately understand the IT systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.

There were other surprises, as well. They used a technique called Wardley Maps to better localize what parts of various value chains were commodities and should be outsourced, which should be purchased, and which should be kept in-house because they created durable, competitive advantage. They used this exercise to methodically disposition their technology stacks, given the business context.

the developers will eventually be responsible for testing their own code, with QA taking a more strategic role, coaching and consulting.

Complex work is managed so that problems in design and operations are revealed.

One of the most important parts of any improvement initiative is to define a measurable goal with a clearly defined deadline, between six months and two years in the future. It