Strategy

Covid-19, Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Everything is normal already

Last week’s first in-person business meeting came and went, and Friday’s “first evening dinner at a restaurant with friends in ages” did too. Family round for lunch in the garden yesterday was very good, and today’s Sunday lunch with different friends at another restaurant will be, as well. Next week is already full of scheduled…
Covid-19, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

The Five Forces of Endemic Covid-19

It’s becoming clear what the future will be like. We know what we know, we know what we don’t know, and the main features are now coming into focus.  It’s going to be a balancing act. The first thing that we know that is highly unlikely to change soon, is that Covid-19 is endemic, globally….
Covid-19, Management, Strategy

Covid-19: The Northern Hemisphere looks like a problem

In the last week of February, daily fatalities in the Northern Hemisphere broke the downward trend that it had been following with the rest of the globe, and punched upwards, and this upward move has become stronger in recent days. Daily fatalities per million of population in northern countries is now higher than at any…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy

Why Cloud now matters for the CFO

Back in the day, Cloud was just a technology for technologists. It had some business benefits, maybe, but they came anyway, regardless of the Cloud solution. The design choice was a technical one. This picture is changing as the use of Cloud has extended through deeper and wider penetration across the organisation, and as the…
Covid-19, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Covid-19 insights: Hard hats must be worn in this area

I wrote recently about the Angry Mob of Covid Issues coming towards us in 2021, and the first straws in the wind are here. Life for decision makers is starting to get complex, as expected. Vaccines are delivering good news and much of the data emerging as a result of extensive deployments around the world…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

The pressures driving the direction of Cloud

Time was when Cloud was simple: you did or you didn’t. If you did, there was a couple of big brands to choose between, and away it went. Not any more, at least not for anyone with a complex requirement, and there’s the rub: fewer and fewer firms have simple Cloud infrastructure requirements these days….
Entrepreneurs, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why your independence matters in the Cloud

Change in the business world today is widespread and hard to predict. For business decision makers, freedom of choice and action are essential, now like never before. Hidden constraints and barriers conspire against the agility and responsiveness that allow successful navigation through the challenges and on towards achieving objectives and ambitions. Most firms now rely…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Why vaccines make business different from personal life

Last year was the year of strategic uncertainty. We began 2020 with a big shock in the Spring, empty roads, makeshift working from home, and immense turmoil as we all scrambled to work out how to survive for as long as it might take. We didn’t know how long that might be or what might…
Covid-19, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

The angry mob of Covid issues coming in 2021

We will look back on 2020 with some nostalgia as a year when life was challenging but simple. The strategy was Hope and Cope, and this would all be over soon.  That myth will evaporate in 2021. At one level, the twelve months ahead looks like a straightforward journey with obvious steps to take in…
Covid-19, Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Everything is normal again

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, or at least it used to be. There was a time when we looked forward to more of everything we hoped for and had a good chance of it arriving. Or that was what we thought. We were planners, full of ideas about the things we were going to do,…
Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Sickness is the risk that decision makers must manage, not fatalities

Family friends of ours set off last week to drive to see their son who is in his first term at university. They had a call in the middle of the journey – their son had been hospitalised with Coronavirus. Not long ago, a friend of mine was out on his mountain bike with a…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Navigation aids for decision makers in a Covid World

For a few months in the Spring of 2020 it was hard to see what any sort of future looked like. Business decision making was strictly about securing survival and, as they say in Formula One: “If you want to finish first, first you’ve got to finish”.  Often, the amount of time this survival effort…