War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age

Some takeaways: Work in small teams, create fast feedback cycles, reduce requirements-in-process, improve security hygiene, deliver small pieces of work frequently.

The task of CAS leaders isn’t to issue orders, but to put in place conditions that will cause independent actors within it to choose behaviors that will lead to the right outcomes.11 The enterprise leadership team sets the vision that, in effect, defines what delivering business value will mean.¶

The challenge, therefore, is not just to create an innovation; it’s to create a constant stream of innovations, to make innovation a normal part of doing business every day. And that can best be done if we overcome the duality of IT and the business.

Proceeding quickly with reversible decisions reduces the risk of being late to market.

Companies whose investment processes demand quantification of market sizes and financial returns before they can enter a market get paralyzed or make serious mistakes when faced with disruptive technologies. They demand market data when none exists and make judgments based upon financial projections when neither revenues or costs can, in fact, be k

Given an uncertain future, anything that increases your cost of change also increases your risk.

“software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.”

“What we want is not necessarily the lowest possible cost level,” he says. “What we want is the optimal cost level, the

Outsourcing has tended to impair the value of the organizational asset.