Strategy

There’s no such thing as “the customer”

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If there’s one person I’d love to meet, it’s this “customer” virtually all the companies I work with refer to. In many businesses, the customer is this mythical individual who has all the answers, who is the only reason why we can’t or must do certain things and whom everyone must appease for the company … Read more

There’s no such thing as “the ecosystem”

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Similar to living creatures in a biological ecosystem, companies live in a business ecosystem. According to James Moore, a business ecosystem is an economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals – the organisms of the business world. A business ecosystem is characterized by three aspects. First, there’s a symbiotic relationship between … Read more

There’s no such thing as “the data”

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One of the typical patterns I experience a lot when working with companies on digitalization is the claim that they have all the data in the world. They can just pick what they want from the candy store to get the data-driven insights they’re looking for. When inspecting the data in detail, it rapidly becomes … Read more

There’s no such thing as “the team”

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There’s a powerful story in the narrative of Western civilization around the team. It comes up in the context of the military, especially special operations, in the startup community, especially in the early phases of a company, in sports as well as in the leadership literature. The idea is that a group of people can … Read more

There’s no such thing as “the process”

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Although the Agile aficionados tried really hard to kill the notion of process in their efforts to remove the heritage of the capability maturity model, the fact is that every team, company and business ecosystem uses processes. These can be formally defined, to the point of individuals or companies being legally liable if the process … Read more

There’s no such thing as “the architecture”

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It’s highly controversial to claim that there’s no such thing as “the architecture” of a system. On the one hand, folks in R&D use the term to indicate that the technical debt in the system has reached a point where more resources need to be dedicated to architecture refactoring. On the other hand, those on … Read more

There’s no such thing as “the system”

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As humans, we like to label things and put boundaries around them. As we have limited intellectual and information-processing capabilities, this helps us abstract otherwise complex concepts and use them in building even higher-level concepts that we can use to explain, predict or create things. Of course, the nature of this process is that it … Read more