Quote: Facing reality is tough.  We may discover things we don’t want to confront.  We may not be as strong as we had hoped we were.  We may discover we need new skills to improve our ability to compete.  It may tell us we’re spending our time with the wrong customers–that we may have to find new customers.

Quote: The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it over. A series of hills becomes a mountain, and a series of mountains is a career.

Quote: … don’t hide behind a procurement office. I realize this is a policy at many organizations, but it’s one that will almost ensure that you get a poorly scoped proposal from vendors who aren’t the best fit. Make the key stakeholders available for conversations

Quote: The jobs-to-be-done approach is incredibly useful for generating ideas that are relevant and actually have potential. You’re plumbing the depths of what people really feel and what they actually want to accomplish. A powerful head start on innovating.

Quote: Accept the fact that Strategy takes Courage. Without courage you will always “fold” when the going gets tough.

Quote: Strategy is less about the new, new thing than it is about actually delivering on the goals you set. A successful strategy must be translated into front-line activities that are delivered well, everywhere, every day.

Quote: What will you move off your some day list, where your dreams are waiting for the stars and planets to align, and move it onto the front burner, where you have to work to make it happen?

Quote: Knowing your function, understanding your project’s goals, and delivering on your specific role – all of this is critical. Putting it in the context of a really detailed understanding of the business, however, is the key to real excellence.

Quote: Regardless of how you do it, find people with enough spark to care, fight, and campaign for what they believe in. What pushes you and makes you question your beliefs will make your company that much better.

Quote: Observe and learn from others who have been where you are going. But don’t lose yourself on that journey. Who you are is far too important for that.

Quote: IT and the business are partners in their enterprises. When that partnership is not working, neither faction can fix the relationship alone. IT and the business must fix their ‘relationship’ problems together, as opposed to simply transforming IT. Following the couples’ advice above will cause each organization to reflect on their role in the success, or failure, of the relationship. When they do, they will certainly find the need for transformation does not rest solely on IT.

Quote: Here’s a really simple tip for any firm trying to become more innovative:  create your own definition of what innovation should be for your business – and not just for an initiative, but an overarching definition for innovation.  Then, ensure you have the commitment to follow through on the definition and that the people responsible for carrying out the definition understand it, and the vision, strategy and goals behind the definition.  Otherwise, like a rowboat with only one oar, you’ll find your team constantly circling.

Quote: As we go deeper into an information age, I think that we need to have serious conversations about what is colloquially termed piracy. We need to distinguish media piracy from software piracy because they’re not the same thing. We need to seriously interrogate fairness and equality, creative production and cultural engagement. And we need to seriously take into consideration why people do what they do. I strongly believe that when people work en masse to route around a system, the system is most likely the thing that needs the fixing, not the people.

Quote: Your job in 2012 is to not embrace new technology with arms wide open, but instead understand it and learn which disruptive technologies separate you from existing and potential customers.

Quote: I am not a lead, I am a person. A human being with human concerns….I was not ‘generated’ by submitting a lead form. I was generated by my parents many years back after a bottle of wine. I existed long before I clicked ’submit’ to get what was supposed to be a useful eBook, but turned out to be a ten-page stealth ad for your product. (hat tip to Elmer Boutin)

Quote: The essential takeaway is that the new economics of personal productivity mean that the better organized we try to become, the more wasteful and inefficient we become. We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organize ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.

Quote: I see order takers in all industries, selling all kinds of things–products, services.  They could be big ticket items.  Order takers worry about their order and are oblivious to what the customer is trying to achieve.

Quote: In this flat economy and a maturing IT discipline, the common denominator across the board is that enterprise suffer from a serious commoditization curve effect and to create and sustain a competitive advantage through IT would call for looking at getting their core business processes get architected very differently and in a manner that competition may not find it easy to imitate or catch-up. Such core processes would in areas like customer support, supply chain, channel management etc. Here the IT system needs to be more flexible and adaptive for varied forms of collaboration as against a rigid form of communication

Quote: We rely, in other words, on a random accumulation of localised knowledge about people, their backgrounds and various behavioural signals. What if we could pool all those circles of wisdom together and extract a common currency for evaluating everyone’s levels of expertise, social resonance and, above all, such critical attributes as trustworthiness? Well, that race is now on.

Quote: Give yourself permission to take unusual entry points into the discussion. Give yourself permission to start in the middle, or at the end. Sometimes, you can get good traction by simply listing your concluding points. What are the essential takeaways that you want to be able to deliver? Write them down quickly. Entry points will suggest themselves.

Quote: The thing is — Louis C.K.’s online marketing campaign wasn’t really a campaign. It was a public agreement that he made with his audience. He promised to create and release an honest product, and the audience promised to continue supporting his future projects. The consumers didn’t just buy a DRM-free download of Louis C.K.’s standup special — they bought into a trusted relationship with the comedian.

Quote: If you give an illiterate a typewriter, he can’t write a novel. He can’t write a sentence, and if he manages to bang out a string of characters that happen to spell out a word, it’s by random chance. If you set up a Facebook page for a socially inept brand, it doesn’t become develop and maintain positive relationships. If it happens to gain even one additional sale, it’s by random chance.

Quote: Change your IT team’s priorities. Make them responsible for business goals, instead of glorified network janitors. Then team them up with marketing and turn them loose.

Quote: We need a lot more failures, I think. Failures that don’t kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won’t work, while opening the door to things that might.

Quote: “The continued trend toward consumerization and cloud computing highlight the movement of certain former IT responsibilities into the hands of others,” said Daryl Plummer, managing VP and Gartner fellow. “As users take more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations have watched shift over the last few years.”

Quote: Becoming a social business doesn’t necessarily help a businesses create more value for anyone or become better at what it does.

Quote: But as important as it is to have insight into customers’ needs, don’t confuse marketing with strategy. What the marketing-only approach misses is that a robust strategy also requires a tailored value chain, a unique configuration of activities that best delivers that kind of value. This element of strategy is not at all intuitive, but it’s absolutely essential.

Quote: In our world of developing products, we all too often look for elaborate solutions. And, worse yet, we put all too many features in our product hoping that it solves all the problems our market may face. What if we simply stepped back and tried to simplify our product instead of building it out to solve many of the world’s problems?

Quote:  For Ed Marx, openness to new ideas is a guiding principle. “If you want to expand your influence, you need to be open to other people’s ideas,” he says. “One is too small a number for greatness.”

Quote: Unfortunately, for every Jobs out there with magical instincts about what will work and a track record to prove it, there are thousands of us lesser souls creating products without such infallible insight into what customers really need.

Quote: If the cloud is the hallmark of your plans for 2012 – 2015 and you cannot talk about how it creates competitive advantage, then fine you have a cloud plan.  But know that you need to answer the competitive advantage question if you hope to be strategic, otherwise your IT strategy is lost in the fog, aka clouds at ground level, and you are obscured by the cloud.