Quote: Information overload is a real phenomenon, but it is I believe, by design. It either works for us or against us and it is our choice as to which way the stream flows. To be clear, information overload is a symptom of over consumption and the inability to refine online experiences based on interest and importance.

Quote: So when someone says “They are so stupid!” – it means they’ve stopped thinking. They say it to feel finished with that subject, because there’s nothing they can do about that. It’s appealing and satisfying to jump to that conclusion.

Quote: One thing seems to be certain—CIOs are needed more and more at the board level. The value they bring as a driver of value is apparent; the question will be whether the CIO is ready to step up and provide it.

Quote: In the end, we need all kinds of people in leadership. Don’t overlook those who are quieter than the rest. Get to know them, understand their strengths and determine whether your assumptions are correct. You might be pleasantly surprised at what the quiet can do for your organization when they are encouraged to lead.

Quote: So I’m here to stress that while it is important, as a Brand or business, to create an air of authority in your field, it is just as critical to really interact with your audience on their level. If that means asking questions on Facebook to create engagement or allowing comments on your blog in order to generate  a healthy discussion of your customers’ needs and wants, then so be it.

Quote: The truth is, most companies significantly underestimate the scope of change required to establish cloud services until it’s too late. In the traditional model, companies buy technology from a vendor as a capital investment, and continue to invest in maintaining and servicing it over time. With the cloud being a service, however, the financial model should be treated more like a utility, requiring the reallocation of budget from capital expenses into operating expenses.

Quote: When technology was inherently and unavoidably complex, it was forgivable that solutions weren’t elegant and simple. It was at one time understandable that finding and visiting a new doctor could take weeks, or searching for enterprise information wasn’t successful. But with a myriad of elegant and simple solutions entering the market, users are learning to expect far more from their products. Simplicity has become a virus that will either destroy you or catapult you to the front of the market.

Quote: In an ideal world, corporate CIOs would blog compelling content consistently, tweet numerous times a day and chime into a few well-chosen LinkedIn discussions on a regular basis.  This would serve multiple purposes: help to engage his employees in the public forums, build corporate brand, build personal brand and increase the firm’s attractiveness to new recruits. However, that’s not realistic for most corporate CIOs. They are simply too busy. Just because a CIO doesn’t engage in social media we shouldn’t discount her opinions or direction on how to orchestrate social media initiatives in the firm.  You don’t need to be an avid ERP user to lead an ERP-driven transformation.

Quote: As Kodak became more successful, complacency grew, leaders listened less to these voices, which made complacency grow some more. It can be a vicious cycle. It certainly was at Kodak. And if you don’t address it first… good luck.

Quote: If your business can’t innovate, it won’t survive when the startup in the garage across town that doesn’t have to answer to your shareholders does all the things legal has been telling you that you can’t do, all the things that you don’t have time for. It’s never been more urgent to stop talking about innovation and actually start doing things differently. And, with digital, the opportunities have never been greater. Instead of innovating on your weekends, overcome the structural impediments and time constraints to real change by approaching innovation from two directions: outside-in and inside-out.

Quote: The simple fact is that we are moving from a world of intuition and gut feel to a world of data and analytical thinking.  Before we had the data, intuition was all we had to fall back on when making decisions.  It’s better than nothing, but it can result in spectacular failures.  I’m fond of telling the story of a certain expensive marketing program that went very wrong that was based on someone’s gut feel.  It involved spending a lot of money without producing much of a result.  When my friend Marc Randolph, someone who is very analytical in their thinking, was asked why it failed, he said, “I don’t know, but it was tragically knowable.”  He meant the idea should have been tested at much smaller volumes before all that wood was put behind an arrow that was doomed to miss.

Quote: There’s this tremendous opportunity for CIO and CMO partnerships to be reimagined or reinvented. We definitely see an opportunity around many of the newer technologies — things like cloud computing or data analytics or mobility. These technologies are really changing the landscape of how companies are doing business and are still in many cases at an emerging state.

Quote: Responsibilities go beyond hooking up servers and making IT connections. It’s all about the data: how you gather, protect, leverage and execute on the information available will be the key to success. Pundits that sounded the alarm for the cloud’s role in the demise of the CIO were absolutely correct. The cloud is going to cause a lot of CIOs to get fired. The bad ones.

Quote: These are only three of the changes that we see that will drive change in the CIO role and what we think you should do about them — embrace continuous design, develop better capabilities in sourcing and governance and focus on leading the organization with innovations that matter.

Quote: The takeaway here is clear: If they want to be considered credible innovation leaders and partners in their company’s strategic changes, it’s vital that CIOs look for ways to make sure that information and technology are playing a part in their board’s vision and driving their company’s fiscal growth.

Quote: So now the magic question… how does a CIO continue the honeymoon indefinitely? I suggest the following: Before the honeymoon is over, definitely within that 6-12 month mark, that CIO better be coming to his or her business partners with real ideas on how they can use technology to change their business. That’s something they can bond over. If they aren’t in that position of helping their business stakeholders use technology strategically, they will at a minimum, be totally marginalized, and more likely, be perceived as a failure.

Quote: Surprisingly it was ’60’s rock star Jimi Hendrix who said “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens”. We instinctively know good management is far more about listening and understanding than it is about demonstrating your depth of knowledge. Most people would consider a good manager to be someone who openly and honestly sets you reasonable tasks, is supportive and informative in helping you achieve them, makes participants feel valued and secure, responds to any issues quickly in real time and acknowledges and celebrates your efforts and completion.

Quote: Technology allows us to do magical things that we couldn’t have dreamt about even 10 years ago. And that is a good thing. But it has also made us slaves to those things. Paraphrasing Seinfeld, we don’t want to know what’s going on around us; we want to know what’s else is going on.

Quote: Learn from the past. Take action – keep moving forward everyday. Never stop dreaming, envisioning and communication a better future for all.

Quote: Good news first: Because so much of what IT does is more practice than process, we have firsthand experience with the sorts of tools that are useful for supporting practices — tools like Visio, various IDEs, and project management software. The bad news: What we in internal IT know how to do is to build or integrate transactional systems — the kind of systems that support business processes… But building the sort of open-ended tools useful for supporting business practices? That’s a practice, too. It just isn’t one most IT shops have mastered. Has yours?

Quote: This social media explosion means that more content is reaching more people than ever before. With a little online elbow grease, pretty much anyone can now read a few articles on Facebook, publish a couple of blog posts, and start calling themselves an expert at something. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to listen.

Quote: The problem with much of our planning is we focus on what we want to accomplish, we don’t spend a lot of time anticipating the customer.  What do they want to accomplish in the meeting?  What questions, concerns, issues might they have?  Are we in sync with where they are in their buying process?

Quote: We’ve also found that team members are more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving the team’s goal is left somewhat ambiguous. If a team perceives the task as one that requires creativity, where the approach is not yet well known or predefined, its members are more likely to invest more time and energy in collaboration.

Quote: So what’s the solution? Accept that everything becomes commoditized. Develop a strategy that doesn’t simply rely on being the biggest. Develop a strategy — a difficult to replicate, cogent set of practices in an industry — that assumes everyone will have the advantages of being the biggest. Get to know your customers. Develop a vision of the future. Build things that people want. Realize that everyone will have access to scale.

Quote: On the other hand, there are literally thousands of organizations (including non-profits) that head down the path of mediocrity by rushing to offer 57 varieties, merely to please today’s shareholders, merely because they can.

Quote: Successful ideas are not born in secret: they emerge from open and vigorous dialog around new information, and then they are actively pulled into the market by a commercialization team rather than being pushed by an ideation team. In the intensity of the innovation process, it’s easy to divide into a world of “us” and “them.” But to innovate well, teams must be permeable, inviting the outside in and engaging the broader community to transform an idea on a napkin into a new product or service in the marketplace.

Quote: First and foremost, we must acknowledge: the entirety of marketing is in a perpetual state of disruptive innovation. Google changed everything. Then YouTube. Then Facebook. Then Twitter, Foursquare, Groupon, Quora. Apple has changed everything in mobile marketing and apps on our phones and tablets. My list of 131 different kinds of marketing offers a taste of the exponential explosion of new marketing approaches. And the pace of change only seems to be accelerating.

Quote: Here’s how it works. When a problem occurs, swift and effective resolution can elevate repurchase intent to a level that’s actually greater than if the problem had never occurred at all. Every problem, if managed well, is thus an “opportunity” to boost overall loyalty among a company’s already loyal customers. Spill soup on a guest in the hotel dining room? Solution: offer on the spot to dry clean the suit or, if the damage is severe, offer to replace it entirely. The customer is delighted; the employee has done the right thing; the hotel raises that customer’s lifetime value.

Quote: The truth though, is that doing what you’ve been doing is going to get you what you’ve been getting. If the narrative is getting in the way, if the archetypes you’ve been modeling and the worldview you’ve been nursing no longer match the culture, the economy or your goals, something’s got to give.

Quote: Success is always a result of teamwork; the leader needs to give the team freedom to take decisions. When they succeed credit goes to them, when they do not, the leader takes the responsibility for lack of success. Such teams rarely need to be reminded of what matters, they rarely let the leader down. My legacy today lives with most of such team members who are shining bright.

Quote: Try to find that “Victory Tower” moment in your life. If you don’t have one (and I’d be quite surprised if you don’t) then get one. You don’t necessarily have to join one of the armed forces or do something physically risky, but you can find something that pushes you beyond what you think are your limits and show that you are capable of more than you believe possible of yourself.

Quote: That means entrepreneurs and corporate managers introducing sustainable innovations must develop the strategic patience to recognize the proper balance between all three—when to loosen the demands on one or the other in order to stay in business. As consultants, it was always easier to let the budget slip—that mistake was forgotten if the work was good and things made it to COMDEX on time. For sustainable innovations, on the other hand, I suspect the better strategy is to be patient for scale.

Quote: Pundits argue that since some key technologies are now a commodity, we no longer need a CIO to handle them. But I’d turn that argument around: that’s precisely when you do need a CIO, to rise above the commodity level and figure out how to leverage technology for competitive advantage and business value. And the way to do that means using something other than technology that’s available to everyone, just off the rack. You want a differentiator.