There's a rule out there, circulated widely as conventional wisdom, that you should never bring up a problem in the workplace unless you have a proposed solution. For example, consider the following excerpt from this Inc. Magazine article, Eight Things Great Bosses Demand from Employees: Rule 6: Provide
Strategy
Like many others, I have often used Salesforce / Siebel as a classic example of Innovator's Dilemma style disruption. Several months ago, in response to this article about Host Analytics, I received a friendly note from former Siebel exec and now venture capitalist Bruce Cleveland saying roughly: “nice PR
Business travelers spent $260B in 2012 with food services being the #1 source of expense. Salespeople love dinners with customers and prospects. Marketers love networking dinners. We have customer advisory board dinners, pre-board dinners, awards dinners, relationship-building dinners, team dinners, customer appreciation dinners, partner summit dinners, project completion dinners, analyst
Management
Congratulations! If your company is like most, you've recently finished a (hopefully) solid 2013 and, from an EPM perspective, completed your 2014 annual planning process. Before we get too excited, however, let’s ask one quick question: did you just make a plan or a budget? In business,
BI
Since it is the season of predictions, I thought I'd offer up a few of my own for 2014, based on my nearly three decades of experience working in enterprise software with databases, BI tools, and enterprise applications. See the bottom for my disclaimer, and off we go.
There's a well established school of thought that high-tech startups should focus on a few vertical markets early in their development. The question is whether government should be one of them? The government seems to think so. They run a handful of programs to encourage startups to focus
Enterprise
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) space is full of seemingly simple metrics that can quickly slip through your fingers when you try to grasp them. For example, see Measuring SaaS Renewals Rates: Way More Than Meets the Eye for a two-thousand-word post examining the many possible answers to the seemingly simple question,
Databases
Two weeks ago MongoDB, formerly known as 10gen, announced a massive $150M funding round said to be the largest in the history of databases lead by Fidelity, Altimeter, and Salesforce.com with participation from existing investors Intel, NEA, Red Hat, and Sequoia. This brings the total capital raised by MongoDB
Cloud
**** Please note that this post has been superseded by A Fresh Look at How to Measure SaaS Churn Rates. I'm leaving it posted to protect in-bound links and because I think it's still worth reading, but if you want my latest thoughts on how to calculate
FP&A
I'm always struck by how often good business ideas, conceived with the best of intentions, get flipped upside-down when applied by some managers. A favorite example is the 3x pipeline rule about which I've already blogged (see The Self-Fulfilling 3x Pipeline Coverage Fallacy). Another might be
Management
I was talking to a startup CEO the other day and he said: Sales is From Mars, Engineering is From Venus Sure. Two things typically go wrong in this relationship. One is that you have a strategic alignment problem. The other is that you're treating sales and engineering
Management
Question from a reader: How much does my general manager need to know about my department? Frankly, he/she doesn't seem that interested in what we're doing or spend that much time with us -- which I suppose is a good sign in some ways. On
