3/12/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Fintech is a hot space at present, with many companies entering the space and threatening financial services stalwarts. It is an interesting time to check on the progress of the first ever global fintech company, PayPal. The company was famous for its early leaders such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, each of whom went on to make even bigger impacts in the world of technology.
I recently caught up with the company’s chief information officer Bradley Strock, who has been in his role for three and a half years. We discussed PayPal’s transformation into a more customer-centric company, giving customers more choices of funding vehicles. We also covered how PayPal has successfully navigated the shift to mobile finance, resulting in a 50 percent increase in mobile payment volume in 2017. Strock covered his priorities of security, stability, enabling the company’s business strategy, and improving the company’s ability to effectively collaborate. Strock believes that PayPal will play a big part in offering better financial options for the two billion people globally without financial services.
In January of this year, Strock joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, as he commenced a directorship with $700 million revenue Elevate Credit, Inc., which provides online credit solutions to non-prime consumers, typically defined as those with credit scores of less than 700.
Peter High: Could you provide an overview of your role as CIO of PayPal?
Brad Strock: Most people are probably familiar with PayPal. We operate in over 200 markets around the globe. We are on a mission to democratize money and have had a great deal of success over the last couple of years. 2017 has been a great year in particular.
For tech companies, the role of the CIO is a little different. My scope of responsibilities centers in two areas. One is what I call the more traditional, internal IT function, and this encompasses everything from our corporate networks, corporate data centers, and end-user devices, to most of the internal applications and services that employees use on a day-to-day basis.
The other half is the product development role for customer service. We service our customers globally. We take calls in 24 different languages over chat and email, and we manage the infrastructure and products that our customers interact with to solve their problems. In many cases, we have teammates who help them solve their problems. Those are the two parts of my role.
High: The product portion is the non-traditional aspect of your role as CIO. This gives you the opportunity to not only interface with the greater organization in fundamentally different ways, but also with PayPal’s customers. Can you talk about that collaboration internally and externally and some of the nuances to the ways in which you do so?
Strock: This has been a journey. I have been at the company for seven years, and I have been in this role for a little more than three years. Since our split from eBay the last two or three years, the company has been transforming in a number of different ways. One of those important ways is around a desire to be a customer-centric company, and to be a customer champion. That is true for both our consumers and our merchants, as we have a two-sided network. We have two sets of symbiotic customers.
Over the last few years, we have been diligent about moving away from things that used to be central to our strategy and instead now asking, “What do our customers want?” Part of that process has been deep discovery work, where we sit with customers and understand their day-to-day pain points.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
by Peter High, published on Forbes
5-31-2016
When one thinks of Motorola, one might think of the consumer brand, but $6 billion Motorola Solutions no longer includes the consumer brand, which was sold to Lenovo in October of 2014. Currently, the $6 billion company is a leader in public safety, providing two-way radios and for providing some of the most reliable voice communication networks around the world. It is focused on the areas of public safety, such as police, fire, and EMS. The company is also focused on smart public safety, which is how first responders use advanced technologies to help communities be safer and work more efficiently.
Technology has always been at the center of what made Motorola an iconic brand, but ironically the IT department was until recent times viewed as a support organization rather than a driver of innovation and efficiency. When Greg Meyers joined Motorola Solutions nearly two years ago, he did so after spending the prior dozen years in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. He was attracted to history of the firm, now dating back eighty-eight years, but also to the transformation that he would lead. In the period since, he has led IT to become much more customer-centric, deriving ideas directly from those who Motorola Solutions serves. He has also rethought the hiring and training methods to ensure that his team has the make-up to drive higher levels of value. He has also ushered in a “cloud-first” strategy to ensure that IT is more nimble, agile, and flexible.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 36th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 34 with the CIOs of companies like Ford, Intel, GE, P&G, Kaiser Permanente, and AARP, among many others, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Can you provide an overview of what is within your purview as chief information officer of Motorola Solutions?
Greg Meyers: It is a pretty simple structure. We are one business unit, one division, and I am the head of IT for the whole company. We are a global company in about one hundred and fifty locations around the world. I am responsible for all the IT that you would expect, which would include the typical systems around G&A, so the ERP environment, the HR systems, legal systems, and supply chain systems, but also play an important role in the front office. A large part of our business is done over e-commerce. My organization is responsible for all the digital interfaces that we have with our customers, both pre-sales marketing, actual commerce of product services and software, as well as post-sales support. Increasingly we are moving into areas that are helping our business evolve into a company that is focused on cloud, Big Data, and those areas. So we incubate a number of those core technologies as well.
High: Can you talk a bit about some of the things that are on your roadmap for the year ahead?
Meyers: Absolutely. For us, there are three things that we are primarily focused on as a department. We are seeing increased revenue around managed services, but also smart public safety. We are seeking to transform from an IT perspective how we interact and engage our customers to drive top line, but also simplify and make it easier for us to do business with them. That obviously helps us improve our bottom line, but also helps improve the customer experience.
The second thing is helping to reimagine our culture. By adopting what we call a cloud-first, mobile-first, wireless-first philosophy, we are looking to untether our workforce from cubicles and wires in their offices to allow them to collaborate wherever they need at any time. We had a pretty well-publicized change last year. We moved 22,000 users from the Microsoft stack to Google stack in one day. We have the largest PBX to cloud transition ever made in the world. We have over five thousand seats that are purely voiceover IP. No hardware. The phone closets are gone.
The third thing is around rethinking what IT means to the company. Rather than it being a back office function, that is, keeping support systems alive, how do we help the company and our customers capitalize on some of the shifts that are caused by the move to mobile, to cloud? And then there is this complicated environment around security, digital mobile. That helps us have the best talent we can ultimately export to our business to create future products and services, and also to incubate a number of those services that will eventually make their way into the products and services that we commercialize.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
3-21-2016
Cars.com is a web 1.0 company, having launched in 1998. It receives roughly thirty million visits per month, and it focuses on the merchandising of new and used vehicles. Kevin Steele leads IT and product for the company, and as such has typical CIO responsibilities, but also is responsible for the Cars.com website, the products the company sells to dealers, the features the company presents to consumers. Therefore, he has an unusually strategic set of responsibilities. Within the past three and a half years, Steele has shepherded in the rise of Cars.com’s mobile presence to reflect the fact that customers increasingly wish to access the site on their smartphones.
In being a customer-centric IT executive, Steele and his team must bear in mind two sets of constituents, both dealers and those who purchase cars. In this interview, Steele describes the methods he uses to stay on top of the needs of each, the sanctity of having a solid strategic planning process, and the need to develop in an agile fashion, among other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read more stories like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Kevin, you are the Vice President of Technology at Cars.com, and I wonder if we could begin with a description of Cars.com’s business. I know you are one of the older of the dot com companies, actually having emerged during the internet 1.0 period. This is an organization I would imagine that has gone through a variety of iterations, changes, evolutions, perhaps some pivots through time. I would love to get your high level overview of the business itself as it stands today.
Kevin Steele: Cars.com is essentially a web platform that enables the connection of consumers that are looking to buy vehicles, both new and used, with dealers that are looking to sell vehicles, both new and used. We are a website that gets approximately thirty million visits per month and we focus on the merchandising of new and used vehicles.
High: When you think about the website and your customer you are in between a couple of different parties— both the dealers and the people who are purchasing cars. How do you think about the experience for each of those sets of constituents? And as you are iterating around the development of products, for instance, when you are reaching out to customers does it tend to be a cross-section between those two different sets of constituents?
Steele: Yes, it is. Our objective is to try to strike a balance between the two. Certainly our site is structured and focused on being a consumer-centric site. We look to create features and content and search capabilities that favor the ways that consumers want to engage with vehicle shopping, in particular engage with dealers from a connections standpoint—whether that be viewing a map and how to reach a dealer through a mobile device, or sending a dealer an email and seeking a quote on a vehicle they are interested in. On the dealer side, we look to make sure that we are leveraging our large audience to the best of our abilities to merchandise dealers in a positive light, make sure that they have the largest exposure to consumers for their inventory, and provide them with products to merchandise, attract, and build brand for their dealerships.
Brandon Metzger, Metis Strategy Associate discusses how commerce and the customer experience is becoming conversational
12/16/15
It is impossible to overstate the explosive growth that mobile commerce (m-commerce) is about to experience.
In the next three to five years, tapping and swiping will give way to a far more familiar interface: conversation
By 2020, there will be roughly four billion new consumers — not to mention an estimated 21 billion ‘things’ — connected to the Internet. With tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy, multi-billion dollar organizations will rise and fall largely on the strength of their mobile strategy.
Mobile is quickly becoming the primary channel through which customers and businesses interact, and hopefully it is already a major focus of your organization’s digital strategy.
However, as communication becomes constant, it is increasingly clear that the future of mobile interactions is not websites or native apps.
Instead, in the next three to five years, tapping and swiping will give way to a far more familiar interface: conversation
A few weeks ago, I needed to book travel arrangements for a business trip. Rather than navigate to an airline website or online travel agency such as Expedia, I opened a new app called Operator.
Rather than navigate through countless drop-down menus, imputing everything from destination and dates to preferred airlines and class, I had a pleasant conversation with one of Operator’s ‘travel experts.’
At any given time, I may be engaged in multiple conversations simultaneously (e.g., colleagues on Slack, friends on GroupMe, roommates on Facebook Messenger, etc.) As such, it was effortless — even natural — to book a flight through a conversation.
Further, though the conversation lasted roughly 30 minutes, it was far more convenient than using a travel website or app. I rarely respond to texts as soon as I get them, nor do I expect an immediate response. Indeed, the variable speeds that messages can be produced and consumed are a major advantage of messaging interfaces.
As mobile eats the world and messaging surges — we sent a staggering 43 trillion messages globally in 2015 — businesses and entrepreneurs are beginning to recognize the opportunity for commerce provided by the constant communication that is inherent to mobile messaging.
Led by Tencent-owned WeChat in the East and Facebook Messenger in the West, messaging apps are rapidly evolving to allow users to buy products and order on-demand services, send payments, communicate with businesses, and more generally engage in conversational commerce.
Conversational interfaces allow users to ask questions, receive answers and even accomplish complex tasks in both the digital and physical world though a natural dialog.
The move by major messaging platforms comes years after tech giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft made conversational plays at the operating system level (Siri, Google Now and Cortana).
However, the tech giants are not alone. There is an ever-expanding list of conversational and invisible apps that do everything from schedule your meetings and book your travel to monitor your health and save you money.
Conversational Interfaces (CIs) allow users to ask questions, receive answers and even accomplish complex tasks in both the digital and physical world though a natural dialog.
Our relationship with the digital world will completely change due to intelligent agents you can interact with. — Yann LeCun (Director of Facebook AI Lab)
While it is increasingly clear that conversational interfaces are the next big thing in business, design and technology, there exists no clear best practices for how to implement them.
When I was booking my flight, Operator’s CI acted as an intermediary between American Airlines and myself. However, the interface can also be used to give businesses a more direct relationship with their customers.
As a launch partner for their Businesses on Messenger program, KLM will send your itinerary via interactive chat bubble in Facebook Messenger after you book a flight. When it is time to check in, you will be notified in the same thread, as well as receive your boarding pass and any updates. If you want to change your flight, simply search “KLM” on messenger, open the thread, and ask. By providing permanent context, the experience becomes friction-less.
The true promise of conversational interfaces are realized when the conversational user interface intersects the trend of intelligent agents:
As the price-performance of computation continues to advance exponentially, technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, neural networks, and cloud computing are finally powerful enough to realize the Sci-Fi holy grail of intelligent conversational interfaces — or Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs).
Infused with intelligence, VPAs anticipate users’ needs, further reducing the friction between the user and their goal. Imagine how my interaction with Operator could be different in the not too distant future:
Only then does it require my attention.
The night before, I set my alarm for 3:30am and go to bed.
I awake at 3am to a message from my VPA informing me that travelers are complaining of broken security equipment and long lines on twitter. It suggests I depart earlier than intended to ensure I make my flight.
I agree, and at 3:30 I get a message that my Uber is arriving.
In the current discovery based landscape, companies largely rely on brand recognition and marketing budgets to drive customers to their website or use their app.
However, as messaging and notifications replace search and discovery, the factors of competition will change. By 2016, Gartner projects that companies will compete primarily on the customer experience they provide.
Guided by the philosophy of anticipatory choice, concealed by the familiarity of messaging, and armed with powerful technologies and mountains of data, conversational interfaces will prove to be the preferred point of contact between customers and the digital realm.
In this new age, those that succeed will do so not on the strength of their brand, but on their overall ability to accomplish the tasks and sub-tasks that make up a user’s goal.
As functions such as sales, advertising, customer service and CRM increasingly shift to conversational channels, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2016, $2 Billion in online shopping will be performed by digital assistants. This may prove to be a low estimate, but Gartner echoes Ben Thompson’s analysis that conversational assistants will be the “killer application.”
Old systems will collapse as entrepreneurs figure out how to optimize and reinvent inefficient businesses, products, and services to provide consumers with all things better, faster and cheaper. — Peter Diamandis
Looking forward, companies like Viv — founded by the team behind Siri — are aiming to provide an intelligent interface to the world around us. In the new paradigm they are working to usher in, intelligent conversational interfaces become the “orchestrating mechanism to the world of information and services.” As co-founder Dag Kattlaus writes, billions of connected ‘things’ and thousands of services will cooperate and compete with each other to accomplish the user’s goal in a massive marketplace hidden behind a familiar messaging interface.
As these feedback loops continue to accelerate, conversational interfaces will quickly bring about a tectonic shift in the relationship between businesses and consumers.
Companies may be tempted to study the best practices of their competitors before committing to a strategy. However, the time it takes for a technology to go from deceptive to disruptive is plummeting, as are the barriers to entry. It is better to forge your own path — even if you are uncertain — than to be caught flatfooted.
Let there be no doubt, as conversational interfaces proliferate and consumers adapt, businesses that can provide the best experience, with the least friction between the user and their goal, will enjoy massive success.
To best position themselves, companies can prepare by taking the following steps:
Companies must put legacy, reputation and ego aside and address fundamental questions about their core values, as well as the value they provide to customers. Such questions may include:
Companies should digitize as many aspects of their products and services as they can.
In the hypothetical scenario to the left, Mattel looses a customer — despite their preference for the brand — because they were not best positioned to accomplish the user’s goal. Meanwhile, Disney gained the customer because they digitized their product and made it easily accessible.
Finally, organizations must automate as much as possible. To achieve this, companies must be able to collect, analyze and repackage data effectively, as well as be willing to integrate. As the Internet of Things explodes and machine-to-machine communications surpass human-to-machine communications, this will be critical.
In 2003, systems theorist and futurist John Smart observed that the number of words per search query was increasing at a quasi-exponential rate. Given that the average human-to-human query length is 11 words, he predicted that intelligent conversational interfaces would emerge in the 2015–2020 time frame.
Their emergence, he said, was likely to be the most important enabling information technology development and collective intelligence advance our planet would see in the next quarter century.
This is just the beginning.
Brandon Metzger is an Associate at Metis Strategy, a business and technology strategy and management consulting firm headquartered in the Washington D.C. metro area
12-14-2015
Few industries were hit as hard as financial services companies were during the economic crisis of 2008. Ally Financial was reborn during this period, having once been General Motors Acceptance Corporation, better known as GMAC. The company rebranded in 2010, and continued its historical focus on auto financing, but also reinvented itself as an online bank.
Michael Baresich joined the company as CIO in 2012, having been an IT executive at a variety of major financial services companies. At that time, the focus was still on cost cutting, as the its major shareholder at that time was the U.S. Treasury. He was also keenly aware that the company needed to prepare for growth, and he was one of several executives who helped with the company’s push into digital business. Even with the cost cutting imperative, he hired many web and mobile developers to ensure that the company was positioned for growth. As a result, Ally Financial is considered one of the digital disruptors in the financial services space.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 30th interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To listen with past interviews with the CIOs of P&G, Microsoft, CVS Caremark, and GE, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your company, Ally Financial. For those who might not be familiar with it, could you describe Ally Financial’s business?
Michael Baresich: Ally Financial might be best known via our bank subsidiary, Ally Bank. Ally Financial is a financial holding company that had its roots in GMAC, but has been a standalone company since 2006. We like to think of ourselves as having two killer apps. One is the auto finance business, where we are the largest dealer supported auto finance company in the United States. The other killer app is Ally Bank, which has won best online bank from Money Magazine five years running.
High: When you joined the company, like so many other financial institutions, it was a trying time. The organization was roughly 70 percent owned by the government. Could you talk a bit about IT’s role in getting the company back on a healthy footing without government assistance?
Baresich: From an IT perspective, we had two main goals. One was structural, and the other was financial/economic. With respect to the structural goal, from the business side there was a high degree of alignment and congruence between ourselves and our major shareholder – the U.S. Treasury. They wanted us to become independent, and we wanted to become independent of that ownership structure. The business had a clear focus on the need to restructure the company, sell certain assets, and restructure others. But, I would not say that the IT underpinnings of the company were top of mind.
As we began to think about selling off certain business units or separating from another, there were pretty profound IT implications that I discovered in the first couple weeks of my job in early 2012. Notably, most of the in-house managed IT assets – datacenters, and the expertise to run them – were part of business units that we were about to be separated from.
11-9-15
Donagh Herlihy is one of the first Chief Information Officers in the US to take on additional responsibilities. He did so when he took over the Human Resources function at Wrigley while he was still CIO nearly 15 years ago. Since then, he has been the CIO and Vice President of Supply Chain Strategy and Planning at Wrigley, CIO and Senior Vice President of IT and eCommerce at Avon, and now he is the Executive Vice President Digital and CIO at Bloomin’ Brands, which is a $4.5 billion revenue casual dining restaurant company based in Tampa, Florida.
Donagh’s catholicity has been remarkable, and he owes it to a combination of good timing, a desire to think of business outcomes first and IT second, and simply putting his hand up to let others know that he had this ambition. He believes others will likely follow in his footsteps, as he notes in this interview, and he offers a variety of lesson for those who wish to do so.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 25th article in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 24, please visit this link. To listen to future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we might begin with Bloomin’ Brands. Could you take a moment to describe the business?
Donagh Herlihy: Bloomin’ Brands is one of the world’s largest casual dining restaurant companies with about 100,000 team members and we are headquartered in Tampa, Florida.
Our portfolio of brands includes Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill and the fine dining concept Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. We have close to 1,500 restaurants throughout 48 states, Puerto Rico, Guam and 22 countries. We are listed on the NASDAQ with revenues of about $4.5 billion annually.
High: Your role at Bloomin’ Brands is Executive Vice President of Digital, in addition to holding the title of Chief Information Officer. The topic of digital, as broad as it is, is certainly very hot these days. Could you take a moment to describe your responsibilities as the head of Digital?
Herlihy: The mission of our digital innovation team at Bloomin’ Brands is to create consumer relevant digital solutions that drive traffic to our restaurants, increase customer satisfaction and enable an ongoing relationship between our customers and our brands. The team is very cross functional and as they transform important aspects of our business, they need a leader on the executive leadership team to support them. I am fortunate to have that responsibility, but I also work closely with the brand’s Presidents and our CMO.
10-6-15
The United States Tennis Association (USTA) is the governing body for United States tennis. It includes over 700,000 members. It also runs the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, best known as the site of the US Open, which recently concluded.
For over 13 years, Larry Bonfante has run technology for the United States Tennis Association as its Chief Information Officer. When Bonfante joined, IT was not critical to the work of the USTA, and its flagship event was not necessarily viewed as being powered by IT. Today, all of that has changed. Players (both professional and amateur), employees, and fans all view information as critical ingredient in their experience with the USTA. As Bonfante notes herein, there is a lot that goes into planning the technology for the most highly attended annual sporting event in the world
Peter High: Congratulations on a tremendous US Open, Larry. Can you provide an overview of your responsibilities at the USTA as CIO?
Larry Bonfante: I’m responsible for running all technology for the US Open which is the most highly attended annual sporting event in the world. I’m also accountable for supplying solutions and technology support for our 17 section offices and our 4 national offices. We also provide online services that allow our more than 700K players and members register for and participate in our tennis programs. In addition to my role as CIO, I lead our corporate culture change initiative and run our Learning & Leadership Development function.
High: You have been at the USTA for more than 13 and a half years. Can you reflect on how the role of technology has changed across that time?
Bonfante: When I first got here IT had no role in supporting the US Open. Now every aspect of the event from ticket scanning, to concessions point of sales, to tournament scheduling to the water fountains outside Arthur Ashe stadium are run by technology. Today consumers have more computing power available on their iPhones than we had on our corporate systems when I started 30 years ago. That allows us the opportunity to leverage technology to create a deeper more personal level of engagement with our players, members and fans.
Peter High
9-17-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Allianz Global Assistance is a leader in assistance services, travel insurance and medical health insurance for travelers or ex-patriots. “Assistance” refers to roadside assistance, but it also refers to repatriation services for people who have issues while they are traveling. As Chief Operating Officer of the Americas, Jay Levine notes in this interview with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, how the assistance label is so meaningful to the company’s mission.
Levine has been a CIO several times over, and joined Allianz Global Assistance as CIO of the Americas before rising to his current role. Levine reflects on his journey and the lessons it might provide on those who might follow in his footsteps.
CIO Insight: Can you talk a bit about your responsibility as COO? What is under your purview, Jay?
Jay Levine: I am the Chief Operations Officer for the Americas zone, which includes Canada, Mexico, the U.S., and I share responsibility for Brazil. These zones all have standalone business units serving the products I just described. There are a number of areas of interest starting with organizational management, serving as a PMO. We are responsible for the claims area, the assistance area and travel services, which includes the call center. We also have a financial services group where we do TPA services for specialty products that we provide on behalf of a credit card company. Finally, I oversee administrative services to do staff planning, reporting analytics and budgeting across the business units for which I am accountable.
CIO Insight: Talk about the process transitioning from CIO to COO, especially how the opportunity presented itself to you and what it is about your experiences as CIO that made you ready for this set of responsibilities.
Levine: I certainly aspired to move beyond the CIO role over the last 10 years. I came up through the software ranks as you mentioned as CTO. The more mature I got into my career, the more involvement with the business beyond the technology became more interesting to me. So it was an aspiration of mine and I was unsure whether I would fulfill it as I moved into the last third of my career.
One of my colleagues, the COO, moved out of the company to a great opportunity, at a time when I was fulfilling both the zone CIO role and overseeing a business transformation in Paris. The former COO and I shared the same boss, so when this happened, I threw my hat into the ring. Obviously my boss felt I was qualified and I had attributes he wanted to see more of in the operations area. It is such a technology-driven operation that he was looking for someone with a technology background. I knew the infrastructure, the domain from a business point of view and I had a burning desire to be closer to customers.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
05-13-2015
To survive, CIOs need to rethink their roles. They need to be more strategic and deeply immerse themselves in both their businesses and industries. The New Style of Business means external partners now perform an increasing number of tasks once relegated to IT departments. Likewise, technology that was once expensive and laborious to maintain has become much less so.
Traditionally, CIOs have been primarily chief infrastructure officers. It’s only recently that an elite cadre of CIOs has begun treating information as a strategic asset. Yet realigning the CIO role will be challenging. Most companies use a timetable that is woefully short—quarter to quarter, or over one year.
TAKE THE LONG VIEW
In my latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, I describe the experience of Gerry Pennell, CIO of the London 2012 Summer Olympics. Pennell notes how technology changed over the four-year span between games. At the 2008 summer games in Beijing, the iPhone and Twitter were in their infancy; Myspace and Facebook had roughly the same number of users; cloud computing was more hype than reality; and the iPad didn’t even exist.
If Pennell had translated and transposed the 2008 strategy for 2012, it would have been a disaster. This illustrates why CIOs would do well to develop strategies with multiyear timelines.
To continue reading the Article, please click here:
2-16-2015
The time before going to bed is critical to ensure that one closes out the day that has passed, plans for the day ahead, but it is also critical that the mind is calmed so that one has a restful sleep. Too many successful executives get this wrong. One can only burn the candle at both ends for so long before it will mean that they are not as productive as they should be at work, and not as happy as they should be overall. Based on research and conversation with successful executives on the topic, here are the five things that successful people do before they go to sleep:
Spend Time with Family
Successful executive often have a difficult time drawing the line between work and personal life, simply picking work back up upon arrival at home. The time to decompress with family is essential. As David Brooks points out, a happy marriage (and by extension a happy family) is more important than a good job to one’s well being. I must admit that I was also struck by Alex Blumberg’s thoughts during episode four of the excellent Startup podcast entitled, “Startups are Risky Business“, in which he describes how he was overcome with emotion in reading Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and learning for the first time the lesson intended for parents: you only have so much time before your children will be independent of you. Make the most of your time with them.
