Over at Management Matters, guest blogger Steve Burrows writes of high profile systems failures at Tesco and Barclays in the UK:These instances, two major private sector failures of customer-facing IT in a week, show us not only that the private sector is not immune to IT failure, but that our biggest corporates with effectively unlimited IT resource working to their own objectives and timescales still don't get IT governance. In both cases one has to ask what went wrong? Where was the testing? Who oversaw it? Who authorised the go live decisions? It seems the private sector still has some lessons to learn about delivering major IT projects successfully, hopefully it will do so more quickly and with less pain than the public sector. Steve, I don't know about you, but I am yet to work in any large organisation where the problem was a lack of governance. Systems failures don't happen because of governance, or the lack of it.  They happen because large systems which connect to other large systems are simply too complex for anyone to be sure of what's going to happen when you turn them on.
Yes, I know that the answer to this is testing. But the real problem is this: getting certainty that things will work out the way they are supposed to requires that you duplicate your production environment down to the very last server, the very last item of data, and find a way to realistically replicate actual user behaviour at the scale the system is supposed to handle. To get 100% certainty, the test environment has to duplicate real life in every detail, and that costs. I don't know any large processing operation that can afford to do this, actually. Most can barely afford to keep their production systems going.
Since you can't be certain whats going to happen when you turn on a new system, management is expected to make a decision on go-live given the incomplete  information they have to hand. Sometimes they know enough that there is a pretty low level of risk of something going wrong. Other times they don't but because of internal pressures, they take the chance anyway. Great IT management isn't scared to take a risk when they assess all the benefits versus all the potential things that can go wrong.
Great IT managers also make mistakes in their risk assessment from time to time too. 
The role of governance is to provide the information that managers need in order to make their risk decision about a system. Like all information collection activities, it is subject to declining marginal returns. The more you have, the more it costs for incrementally less surety. There is a point at which the additional risk you eliminate by adding a new process or a new reporting regime is more expensive than the downside it is supposed to mitigate. 
But there is another dimension to the go-live decision, and that is the non-IT pressure that managers are subjected to. Sometimes, the business downside of failing to go-live at a particular time is so significant that it justifies the risk of things going wrong, even if you don't have surety of the system. Neither Steve nor I know what really went wrong at Tesco and Barclays, but it is reasonable to guess this: those IT managers would have been under substantial pressure to get those systems out the door, and they took a calculated risk.
Steve goes on to imply that this kind of risk taking is management incompetence:The reputations of all IT workers are demeaned by such failures, the governance and management failings that allowed these errors to occur bring us all into disrepute by association. The harm suffered due to IT failings in large corporates not only affects them and their customers, it taints all of us in the IT profession, fairly or otherwise.I don't for a moment suggest that it is acceptable that major systems fail. Nor do I think taking stupid risks is sensible management. But since every change to a major IT system is an exercise is risk assessment, things are going to go wrong from time to time. It is simple to blame management when things go wrong, but not so simple to come up with a solution that reduces the chance of failure to zero in a way that's affordable.
Actually, if such a solution existed, I think we'd all have deployed it by now. Steve, if you know something that the rest of us don't, now is the time to share.
In the meantime, the answer is not to have more  governance, it is to have proportional governance, and invest in long term complexity reduction.  Complexity reduction not a complete solution, of course, but what it does is reduce - over time - the amount of information you have to get before you can safely take a decision to go live.

As an innovation person, I'm always startled when I see a product or service which turns into a huge, overnight hit. Especially one which comes from nowhere.
The reason I'm startled is that innovation academics have long used a thing called diffusion theory to explain how new ideas get adopted by populations. The long and short of it is, you find a small group of people who aren't risk averse and who are willing to try a new thing, and they tell their experiences to like-minded people who are more risk averse. The positive feedback from the first adopter influences the next to adopt, and so on. This process builds up until you get to the tipping point, where everyone adopts the new thing en-masse. Wikipedia explains this in more detail.
My surprise comes from the fact that this whole process takes time. Sometimes, lots of time. So, when it happens overnight, something else must be going on. Hit products - which I'll define here today as ones where you get mass adoption without the slow build up from diffusion - shouldn't happen.
Of course, hit products do happen. And I have the germ of a theory as to the reason.
My key observation is this: breakthrough, radical innovations are never hits. Hits happen when a previous breakthrough is incrementally improved over time, and then shifted sideways into an aligned problem space where they cause a revolution. In all the cases I've been able to find so far, this seems to be true.
Let me give you a historical example: the steam engine.
The steam engine was initially not very much use. It was invented in Greece in the first century AD - a boiler with two spouts on an axel. When the steam came out of the spouts it made the whole thing turn. Not very efficient. The breakthrough: the first time ever a motive force was created that wasn't human or animal.
Some 1500 years later, a steam engine that could pump out shallow mines was invented. It was also not very efficient - the cost of fuel was greater than paying people to bail out the holes.
40 years later, a more efficient engine came along that could do deep mines. It was till expensive, but cheaper than using humans or animals. Steam pumps started to spread.
A few years after that a highly efficient engine was designed, one light enough to move around. Stephenson, the father of the railway, put an engine on rails and used it to tow loads. Then he opened a commerical railway between two cities in England.
Almost overnight, the world changed as railways exploded across the world. 
The diffusion process occurred ordinarily for steam - it just happened in the space of pumping water. When Stephenson moved the pump into an aligned problems space - mechanical motive force for transport - there was no need for diffusion processes because they'd already happened somewhere else. 
There are so many examples of this. Vacuum tubes, invented by Edison, hardly used until they found a home in commercial radio. Polaroid film, an optical oddity until it was used in sunglasses and instant photography. 
What about the hits of today?  
iPad: an incremental improvement of iPhone (the bigger screen) moved into the aligned space of media consumption even though previously tablet adoption was low. Avatar, the movie: just another sci-fi until James Cameron incrementally improved 3D (full depth perception, not just objects flying at you) and moved in into mainstream cinema. Previously, 3D was a gimmick. Google: an incremental improvement on search (better results) moved into the aligned space of contextually relevant online advertising. Before that, ads were about replicating paper.
Now, if this is true, what is the lesson for innovators?
Don't invest in radical innovation - look, instead, for incremental improvements that can be moved sideways and turned into revolutions. Wait for someone else to do the breakthroughs, then build a business by leveraging the diffusion process they've paid for in an aligned space.
Perhaps that's controversial, but I've not found an example yet that refutes this line of thinking. I'd be grateful if anyone can give me some examples that does.

The following is another excerpt from my work on how the vendor relationship looks from the buy-side.

Because direct approaches often fail to get a first meeting, some enterprising firms have spotted an opportunity. They establish themselves as “horizon scanners” or “futurists” and offer to give you free advice about the shape of the things to come. Their value proposition, they say, is to bring the latest and greatest organisations in front of you, providing a curation service that means you don’t have to invest much time in such things yourself. This is inherently attractive, of course, because on the buy side you are always wondering whether there is a a killer tool or service available that competitors have that you don’t.

The problem is that such firms are really fronts for getting the first meeting. Their business model is not to horizon scan for the buy-side, but to sell access to the first meeting to the sell-side.

Now, customers aren’t dumb. After the first session or two, they recognise what they’re getting is a set of meetings with vendors who have paid for the introductions. It is incredibly false, and incredibly time wasting. Almost immediately, the introducer firms get blacklisted.

But here’s the problem with such firms. The product they sell is first meetings, and their currency in any buy-side situation is incredibly tenuous, because customers always see through them very quickly.

Their response is they network throughout an organisation, usually getting a single meeting, but very few more. You often hear people complaining in serial fashion about how much time they waste, and how they are never left alone after agreeing to that first, deadly meetup.

When you sell meetings for a living, of course, you are highly motivated to get as many as possible to sell. Consequently, they take being a serial pest to a whole new level.

Advice to vendors trying to get in the door via an introducer: we will likely be so annoyed by the introducer and their octopus-like procession around our organisations that anything you have will seem insignificant by comparison. Undoing the damage they cause (and which you are associated with) will take ages, and likely render a major sale impossible in whatever timeframe you have available before you get fired.

In almost all organisations there is an authority asymmetry. The number of people who are empower to say "no" is usually much greater than those who are empowered to say "yes". This is because organisations are much more comfortable with staying the same than agreeing to changes. Empowering people to say "no" is a safe option.
It is also true to say that more often than not the  number of people you might have to influence to get something done is significantly greater than the amount of time available to do the influencing. This is why innovators often fail to get much done.
Consequently, its necessary to optimise the return on influence.
For an innovator, there is almost no upside available influencing those with the power to say "no", because the best possible outcome is ambivalence, which is not especially helpful. On the other hand, there is every chance they actually will say "no". Optimising return on influence means the best strategy is keeping your innovation under-the-radar from the nay-sayers as long as possible.
On the other hand, influencing someone with the authority to say "yes" might still get you a negative response, but at least you'll have the chance to move forward. It is a much better value proposition.
How do you tell the difference?
Here's a litmus check which almost always works. The person who controls the money is able to say "yes". Everyone else can only say "no".

I hate to admit it, but I have an iPhone 4. I didn't stand in the queue to get one, at least. But I didn't need to upgrade, and I did it anyway. 
Apple, on their website, described iPhone4 like this: "This changes everything. Again".
The fact is, there is not a single feature in this new handset that I'd consider as game-changing as Apple does. A gyroscope? Please. Front facing camera - it make me look fat. HD Video and 5 megapixels? I hate taking photos and leave that to the better half. Multitasking? I'd already gotten so used to not having it, that now I do, I've forgotten how to use it. Glass case? Clumsy me, just wait till I drop it. 
So actually, I'm siting here now with the thing in my hand and wondering what was going through my brain when I decided to upgrade. I still don't really know. 
But I do know this: once you turn it on and see the screen you get it.
What you don't realise when you stare at a typical computer display all day is how much poorer it is compared to, say, paper. We're all used to this, of course so we don't even think about it.  But the moment you read text on the iPhone, you're hooked. It is painful going back to a traditional display after that. I'm sitting writing this on my laptop, and all I can think about is the pixels I can see on the "s" I just typed.
You don't see pixels on the iPhone any more.
I'm finding myself reading actual books on the thing now, something I would never have even contemplated just a few days ago. I'd read my feeds and stuff on my phone, but actual reading for pleasure? Never.
Anyway, this has changed my expectation for all my electronic devices. I was thinking about getting an iPad, but won't until it has a screen like iPhone. In the next year or so, I'll probably upgrade my laptop, but certainly won't be doing so until it has a screen like iPhone. 
Maybe I won't even update my appliances at home like the microwave unless they have such a screen. Even the vacuum cleaner  has a screen, and now I want it with resolution like on my phone. 
I'm joking about the appliances. At least, I think I am.
But for my real work tools, I'll switch manufacturers and operating systems if they'll give me a screen I can use instead of paper. The difference in the experience when you have to read all day makes that much difference.
My own response is interesting to me. I thought I'd care about the features, and the fit and finish, and other stuff that Apple are known for. Actually, all I care about a commodity component that is extremely replicable by Apple's competitors. 
It is interesting, isn't it, that even when you think about innovation all day, you can still be surprised to discover something you'd written off as incidental to the main game, turns out to be the most important thing of all.

I like it when I discover that people are trying to get their hands on the talent in my teams.
It is nice when they ask if I mind first, but even if they don't, I still like it.
It is far better to have a team that everyone wants than one no-one care about.
Or even worse, one that no-one knows exists.

A very clever man who worked at Microsoft once explained the problems with the Windows operating system to me like this:
General Electric make nuclear reactors and they make domestic kettles. What they don't do is use the same technology for each.
A kettle is not the same thing as a nuclear reactor, obviously, and clearly, trying to create a standard way of boiling water, no matter the application is folly.
But Microsoft have spent years building forcing a figurative standard for water boiling on us, no matter the application, from gaming to high end servers.
And the result is that Windows is adequate, but not brilliant when you want to run home applications. And it is adequate, but not brilliant for business apps as well.
Microsoft is not the only company that's guilty of this attempt to standardise. All large companies do it, from banks (with their lowest-common denominator product sets), to retail (the same experience each time, no matter the customer).
Standardisation is a race to the bottom. Build the thing that suits the most people possible. Reap economies of scale. Deliberately design out anything interesting  to those at the edge of the curve. 
We are wedded to standardisation in big organisations because it makes it feel like we're in control. The thing is, we're not in control. In fact, we're in less control the more standardised we get.
The more standardised you make something, the more you force those who don't fit the lowest-common-denominator profile to go outside the standard. THey are forced to do so because they are creative, or high achievers, or want to make a difference. Standardisation is an attempt to make them mediocre, and they won't put up with it.
The tighter you lock something down, the greater the chance you'll force a break with the standard. The more you standardise, the narrower the band of people who are perfectly satisfied. People who aren't satisfied often take matters into their own hands.  You're less in charge as a result.
The only time standardisation really works is when you have either a zombie customer base or a zombie workforce. If it is your highest goal to achieve either, good luck to you, and have all the standardisation you want. 
But if you want to innovate, delight customers, and have happy employees, find a way for them to break the standard with safety and surety. Most people aren't zombies, and when they're given a choice to not be one, they'll usually take it.
That's why Apple is now a bigger company than Microsoft, by the way. 

If you are doing something genuinely new, you can waste a lot of time tooling about trying to find someone with authority to say "Yes". Frankly, if  whatever-it-is is that new, no-one will know if they have the authority or not. 
So, unless you're asking the very top guy for permission, you're far better off assuming you have the authority yourself. 
Then, at least, you have the chance of asking for forgiveness. 
Instead of begging for mercy at review time because you've failed to do anything at all. 

1. There is no money. Organisations sometimes think you can get innovation without investment. They believe in an "innovation culture" where employees do new things as part of their day job. The reality is that innovative companies have creative employees and some kind of formal enablement. Enablement costs money. Companies that don't spend any (hoping that assigning a person or two to the innovation challenge will do), rarely do very much innovation.
2. Your boss is late majority, or worse, a laggard. They don't like new things, and always need plenty of positive reinforcement from people they trust before they'll even try something new. If they have an innovation programme, it is likely its been forced on them. They won't see the point of the work, and certainly won't support it.
3. Everything is controlled by the Finance Director. Another don't bother moment, because this individual will likely want to make sure of the business case for every single innovation you undertake. Because most really interesting things don't even start to pay off in the short term, chances are you'll get nothing major done. You'll be reduced to incrementalism (not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's what your innovation strategy is), and you may as well rename yourself the Lean Team, rather than the Innovation Team. 
4. The organisation is laser-focussed on core business. If this is the case, especially if it is because the organisation is in distress, then probably innovation will be considered a distraction. Oh, the right words will get said, but when the chips are down, the innovators will be told to go away. Retreat to the core is a classic strategy of an organisation that is disconnecting itself from change, for whatever reason.
5. The company is riding high on established product and service lines. There may be competitors, but for now the position is secure. Innovation will probably not be seen as all that necessary in the scheme of things, because there's nothing going wrong right now. Such organisations have no burning platform for innovation, therefore, none will happen.
6. Audit and governance functions are over-powerful. If your organisation is full of security people, audit people, and governance people with the power to call the shots, then you should consider whether to bother with innovation. These are not bad people, but the organisation has programmed them to shut down change in all its forms. To innovate, you first have to find a way to eliminate their power over the innovators. In many organisations, that's a task which is  practically impossible.
7. The organisations has never had a recovery from a near-death experience. Really innovative organisations have a generation of managers who were either with it when it started (when every day was a near death experience), or who went through a period where there was every chance of a close down. Without such people in place, there's no entrenched belief in the power of change. Ergo, no innovation.
8. Your innovators are stuck in IT. This is a hard one, but the reality is this. If you're an IT innovator, chances are you're there to find ways to "enable" better IT through innovation. This is all very well, but enablement of a support function has much less money associated with it than enablement of a core business line (which in turn, uses IT). Sooner or later, the innovation team will look less attractive as an investment than other available opportunities.
9. Your CEO is risk-averse. If this is true, then even the very best innovations, no matter how well constituted, are likely to fail. This will not be because the CEO doesn't "get" stuff. Rather, the amount of reassurance that he or she will need before they make a "go" decision is likely to be excessive. You can spend all your available time trying to convince everyone whom the CEO might consult of the value, and still miss a key individual that will plant the seeds of doubt. Then you'll have to start all over again.

What follows is another excerpt from my forthcoming volume on the way the enterprise sale appears from the inside:

"Gone native” is generally hated by Sales Directors because their traditional tools of control: the pipeline, the contact reports, the CRM systems, and, ultimately the target, are all pretty much incidental to the gone-native. Gone-Natives do what is required in order to keep their jobs, but are concerned primarily with becoming as close as possible to being an employee of the customer.

What are the behaviours of a gone-native Account Director then? Here are some observations I’ve made watching some of the best and brightest I could find.

Firstly, they’ll hardly ever see the resources they get assigned to make sales as their key asset. In fact, if they get more sales people assigned to them, they are just as likely to refuse than accept. They know that customer will come to them for help in any appropriate situation, because they are trusted. There’s no need to shove propositions down the customer’s throats in order to get new business. The Gone-Native Account Director is more likely to request resources which are ordinarily paid-for. They’ll fight tooth and nail to get them, too, because their number one priority is serving their friends, not making money from them. The internal challenges they face in doing so is likely to be shared with the customer, too, and the customer will probably be extremely sympathetic, rather than just bored with all the machinations their Account Director is going through. Friends, after all, look after each other and try to support each other through difficult situations.

Another sign of gone-native is when there are overly familiar personal relationships that develop, quite outside the normal professional ones. For example, if your Account Director is invited over to the homes of customers for social reasons, its a pretty fair bet you’ve got a gone-native on your hands. I have never seen this happen - ever- with an Account Director who plays relationships in order to optimise economic returns.  But it happens all the time with those who have a deep, and real, concern for their customer.

But the best sign of gone-native is when Account Directors start putting up walls inside your sales organisation to limit the amount of contact other sales resources have with their customer. There will be many excuses for this, but the real meat of the issue for the gone-native Account Director is that they’re embarrassed by the traditional sales approach. They have developed real, abiding friendships. They are doing genuine, partner-forming work. The last thing they need is for some senior person who focusses on economic returns banging around upsetting the applecart.

And upset it they will. It is so obvious to the customer when someone new shows up that has one thing on their mind: doing what they need to do to extract money. A gone native account director is right to be embarrassed. The fact that they allowed a genuine relationship to be abused by someone who has their own selfish interests at heart is mortifying.

My experience is that big organsiations create situations where the politics of success dictate you grow your control of people and resources, even when that is counterproductive to the task you're actually supposed to be achieving. 
You see it all the time, in fact: groups which have, for example, their own HR organsiations, even when there is a central HR team supposed to do the work. Or their own communications groups, because it is "easier" to get things done when everything is located in the one place. And the list goes on and on through Finance, procurement, sales and so forth. 
Empires are wasteful because they are artifices constructed for the sole purpose of providing life-support to the Emperor in charge.
You can often see how the mechanics of disruption work not only against large companies and their operations, but against people and their empires in large organisations as well.
Now, I'm sure very few people reading here have a need for me to explain how disruption works, but just in case, you might read this wikipedia entry on the subject. The basic point is that empires get disrupted in the same two situations that companies do.
Firstly, an empire gets disrupted when someone offers to do quite a bit less than what the empire is setting out to do, but does it more nimbly and cheaply. You see this all the time. Imagine a big development shop with a heavy lifecycle process and miles of governance. When a little team pops up that can just churn out apps at a rate of knots, everyone turns to them to do the work for them, even though there is less assurance. The apps might not work at scale, but at least they work. And they're quick.
The second time an empire gets disrupted is when someone offers the services of something like the empire to a group that previously couldn't access the empire at all. The same example applies as above: most large development shops prioritise work from big paying customers - like core business lines - over the needs of smaller groups like communications. When the new little team pops up, communications is suddenly able to access the same resources as their big-money counterparts, and flock to the startup as a matter of course.
Now, initially, the startup dev group won't even be on the radar of the Empire, but sooner or later, their activities will get noticed. That will most likely happen the first time that the new group gets offered something that would be at the low end of what the Empire would normally take on.
The result is fairly predictable. The Empire will marshall its arguments that the new team should either be disbanded, or folded into the Empire entirely. They'll argue that this will result in "efficiencies" and a superior product. The organisation will be safer, because the "risky" nature of the startup will be mitigated. And blah and blah, onwards for every reason under the sun that explains why the Empire is good and the startup is bad.
The Empire is actually doing all it can to remove a threat to its existence. Even if the Emperor realise it, what the startup is doing is showing everyone that, in reality, the Empire is highly inefficient at what it does, and that's because its purpose is to sustain the top guy, not deliver good outcomes for the organisation.
Disrupting the Empire directly is rarely a successful strategy, because the critical mass of clout and resources it holds means it will always win any battle of attrition. 
On the other hand, the inefficiency of the Empire is also what kills it in the end. It attracts more and more resources in an organisation  (because it is inefficient, and therefore grows its inputs faster than it can grow its outputs) and sooner or later this gets noticed by someone with the power to do something about it.
Almost all empires get broken up in the end, usually taking the Emperor who architected the whole thing with it.  If you can wait long enough, and be beneath the radar so you don't get absorbed, the disruptive little startup group will probably be the trigger that causes this to happen.

There are really two kinds of people who do innovation jobs. Those who rock the boat, and those who don't.
My observation is the latter usually don't make much difference to anything. They're too scared to make a difference. Because they're scared, they only consider doing things that don't matter much.
The fact is this. Innovation jobs aren't supposed to be safe. If you sign up to do one, your duty to your organisation is to change things, to rock the boat.  If there was no desire to change the old way, why on earth would an innovation job have been created in the first place? Innovation jobs are permission to rock the boat.
The skill is in rocking the boat enough that things happen, but not rocking so much you capsize. 
Here's another observation I have about people in innovation jobs. They need to have alternative employment opportunities available to them at all times, or else the financial freedom to be without work for a bit while they find a new role. 
When you don't have that sorted out, you judge every innovation you undertake in terms of how much boat rocking it will likely cause. You limit what you do to preserve yourself. Consequently, you do very little, because there is no such thing as a comfortable innovation job.
It is inevitable that sooner or later someone is going to try to take out the innovators in an organisation if they try to do anything substantive. They'll get called distracting, or "not core to the business", or disruptive, or, even, dangerous. They'll try to take out the innovator, because what else do they know how to do? 
You have to plan for this, be ready to deal with it. Your plans have to handle everything up to and including getting fired. Some innovators do get fired when they cause a capsize. That's tough, but it comes with the territory. If change was supposed to be easy, everyone would be doing it.
But there are plenty of innovators who don't see it this way. Theirs is the land of the comfortable, where taking a justified risk is never justified. 
They are the failed innovators.
Are you too scared to rock the boat? You may comfortable and safe in that case, but you're also irrelevant. You should think about getting a new job, doing something meaningless that doesn't matter. 
By doing so, you will be safe and comfortable, and you will give someone else a chance to make a difference. 

This is an extract from the second chapter of my next work on what the enterprise sale looks like from the buy-side. I've stopped writing "One Big Thing" temporarily to do this, because I'm of the view that a decent guide for enterprise salespeople - not written by a salesman -is overdue. Hopefully, there's some value for people in hearing a few stories about what its like to be sold to.

In this chapter of the book, I'm covering the difficult first meeting, how to get one, and the kinds of preparation we appreciate. And, of course, I'm looking at some of the things that vendors do which we actually hate.
Unless your organisation already has a relationship with the buy-side, getting the first meeting with an organisation can be somewhat difficult. On the buy-side, everyone is deluged with requests for meetings, usually to such a degree that the only way to get any actual work done is to refuse to see any vendors at all.

In the last chapter, I explained that usually, the wares of vendors have much less value to us than they do to the vendors themselves, so unless there is a specific reason for a meeting, we are usually not all that motivated to use our time speculatively. We put up barriers to guard our ability to meet our internal objectives, because however much we might like to see new and interesting things, doing too much of it will get us fired.

So difficult can it be to get a hearing at the beginning of a relationship that vendors have resorted to a number of tricks that usually start things out on the wrong foot. Lets examine a few of these here.

Going to the Boss

One of the most effective ways to get a meeting with anyone in an organisation is to get to the decision-maker’s boss.

On the buy-side, we hate this passionately, and here is the reason. By seeing our bosses, you have essentially forced us to agree to meeting with you whether we have the time or not. We have to meet with you, because we must be in a position to report back to our bosses if they ask us whatever happened. And, of course, because the referral came top down, we are scared that if we don’t meet with you, you will go back to our bosses and complain.

It is even worse when an Account Director has somehow managed to extract some kind of agreement to do something from the boss.

The fact is most bosses don’t have the time to be across all the details of whatever the decision-maker is trying to achieve. Neither will they be aware of whatever else is presently going on that might be affected by whatever agreements the Account Director has managed to extract.

This puts the buy-side in a very invidious position. On the one hand, they want to support whatever calls their bosses have made, but on the other, they have to be able to achieve their goals by pursuing whatever direction of travel they’ve already invested in.

By extracting high level agreements, what you’ve essentially done is create an adversarial situation internally: you’ve made it likely the decision-maker will have to say “no” to their boss.

As you can imagine, this makes the buy-side nervous at best, and openly angry at worst. Not exactly a firm footing with which to start a relationship.

I was once in a situation where a vendor wrote a letter to my chief executive complaining that he’d had no success getting any meetings with any decision makers in our organisation. In this letter, he suggested that we “didn’t get it” and that we were “missing out on huge economic benefits”, and that the approach we were presently following was “just plain wrong”.

Faced with such a letter, what is a CEO to do? Naturally, the letter was immediately referred to us, and we were forced to explain - in detail - our reasons for pursuing the current direction of travel. We also had to agree to see the vendor, even though we expected the meeting to be a waste of time.

It turned out it was, of course. The product gave us capabilities we already had, and was, in fact, inferior. We explained this to our CEO, then blacklisted the vendor. Blacklisting, essentially means we’ll put up even bigger barriers to protect ourselves in the future, and the nett-nett is its unlikely you’ll ever get a meeting again.

This, by the way, is never something that happens on paper. We talk to each other, and the message gets around.  No-one on the buy side is stupid enough to write down a blacklist, but we do have our own jungle-drums that work very well, thank you very much.

The remainder of the chapter explains a number of other tricks vendors use to get first meetings (using Introducers, approaching personal networks, updating the sales pitch, and a few more). Then it goes on to explain what makes a good first meeting, and how to prepare for one. I expect the material to be available in full in about 3 months time.

Tomorrow, I'm going to be giving a talk to a group of young people who have come to our organisation through our graduate programme. They are all very, very bright, and some of them are just about the most motivated to succeed I've seen in a while.

I love working with people at the start of their careers, and particularly this generation. The reason? They know and accept there are dinosaurs around, and they aren't scared of them.

I know when I was starting out, there were also dinosaurs. They had all this experience, all this knowledge, probably won in the "school of hard knocks". They were all senior, and you would never dream of questioning their determinations and decisions. If you did, there'd be consequences. I mean, what would you know about anything? Why would you be entitled to an opinion? Youngsters, you should listen and learn.

Well, that's over.

The dinosaurs today - and I hope I'm not turning into one myself - are hopelessly ill-equipped in many cases to deal with the way things are now. The problem is their years of experience are now a hindrance in a world where what's really important is freshness in absorbing concepts, ideas, and innovation. Things at which young generations have always excelled.

You can imagine the collective meltdown those words are likely to cause in the established IT community, of which I am a part. We're all in charge because of all those years of experience. How dare I suggest all those years are not that valuable?

But, for example, have a look at your IT organisation, and especially at your development processes. I bet you'll find they're gummed up with gates, and procedures, and evaluations and reviews. Everything takes ages, and the mantras will be "reuse" and "architecture" and "governance". These are the hallmarks of the dinosaur.

Why do I say that? Because they are mechanisms for controlling rampant spread of technology solutions in an age when doing big systems was expensive. It is still expensive, but only because of  the artifacts that have been left behind when things actually were expensive. It is our control artifacts that are now making us expensive, not the problems we are asked to solve.

This new generation of tech managers we're growing know this. They sit there and sigh when we ask for "one more gate", knowing that the new world is completely throw away. "Just build it", they mutter under their breaths, and could, indeed, fire up their personal laptop and do it overnight probably if they were of a mind to do so.

Don't laugh. We had this group of students show up once and do a hack-day. In about 24 hours they'd accomplished about as much as we'd done with traditional methods in several months. Oh, of course, it wasn't "governed", and "reusable" and "consistent with our architecture". But is was throwaway. Throwaway is what you want when the cost of development is a reducing function.

And it is a reducing function. I am amazed at what young-people start-ups can accomplish with practically no money. They maybe get half a million dollars from an angel investor and a month or two later have a system that's actually really useful and which people are desperate to use.

They go into these ventures serially. They work until something is obviously not working, throw it away, and start again. It is no accident that many of the most successful tech entrepreneurs presently are pretty young. They're not dinosaurs.

Anyway, back to what I'm going to say to these young technology managers I'm going to speaking to tomorrow.

Firstly, I'm going to tell them to recognise there are dinosaurs around. I'm going to tell them their bark is worse than their bite and even if they get bitten, they have years to recover. But of course, the best won't get bitten, because they will be clever about how they get their messages across.

And I'm going to tell them to question everything that comes from dinosaurs. And that their inexperience with the old way of doing things is their best chance to make a huge difference now.

It was with great interest - though not that much surprise - that I noted the news this morning that Apple has finally overtaken Microsoft in market cap. The market, clearly, thinks the future fortunes of the former are rather more steady than those of the latter.

Personally, I have to agree with the market. Not because I like all the Apple stuff I have, and not because I think Apple have better people or leadership than Microsoft. I am not one of those people who think  Steve Jobs is the lone force that drives the success of Apple, and in fact, I don't see how one man could ever have such influence over every detail in a company that large.

The problem for Microsoft is that it does not yet have its back against the wall, and in fact, has never done. It is not staring death in the face, not even nearly so. It has never even had a near death experience. And, consequently, it is not in a position where is has to do anything very much other than what it has always done: crank out new versions of its old hits.

If there is one thing that I've learned about the innovation process and in particular, radical innovation, it is that there must be a burning platform which forces senior leaders to do something different. Because of Office and Windows, Microsoft has no burning platform, and consequently won't do anything different no matter how hard it tries.

In fact, as we've seen from insiders accounts of life trying to be innovative at Microsoft, such efforts to be different will be killed off by political infighting and blatant defense of empires.

I always hate it, by the way, when everyone holds up Apple as an innovative company, and explains that it is innovation which has driven its present success. Same for Google. Neither organisation is especially innovative, at least when you take the conventional definition of the word. They come with interesting new ideas, of course, but their mastery is in seeking adjacent spaces for stuff that is largely working well and wrapping it in a way that disrupts whoever is there presently.

I don't need to bother with all the typical examples of this since they've all been written about countless times before.

My point is that Microsoft doesn't do this. Their strategy is to innovate in the truest sense of the word. They want to create brand new ideas that turn into hit products. When that doesn't work, they always seek to copy the way someone else has created a hit product, and win the war by attrition.

Microsoft think the product is important, not the business. Apple and Google start from the business and then come to the product. Consequently, they're always going into spaces which aren't always obvious but where they can leverage their capabilities from established hits. Microsoft, in contrast, goes to places where it has neither capabilities or hits.

I wasn't surprised to see one commenter on Mini-Microsoft exclaiming that Microsoft's main problem is its "terrible" marketing, and if it could just get better at that, all its new products would succeed. When you think product, as in "lets build the greatest product", it is tempting to imagine that success comes if you can just get the message out.

That has obviously not worked in the past for Microsoft, and is not the centerpiece of the success of Apple or Google now.

The real problems are twofold though. The first is that Microsoft has no culture of failure, because every failure it has ever had is overshadowed by the huge successes of its two main products. The second is those two main products are such successes that no-one in the company can believe that a product-centric strategy isn't the way forward.

So yes, I do think that Apple is more steady for the future. Its not too late for Microsoft to reverse its direction of travel, but I do have to wonder if that's going to be possible unless they have  a near-death experience.

The thing is, Windows and Office aren't going away, though they may be going into decline. That's a decline which will last years, and the incumbents in Microsoft will be able to dress it up as success for years. There's no burning platform at Microsoft, and there's not likely to be one.

The market has probably got its valuations right.

As I said a week or so ago, I'm busily writing a manual for enterprise sales people. Here's another excerpt, this time from the Introduction.
If you are an Account Director that’s responsible for selling to large organizations, you’ll be well aware of the traditional challenges involved in closing a deal.

You have to build strong and lasting relationships so you can get meetings with the people who can make a buying decision. You need to do so in the face of what is ordinarily quite considerable disinterest, sometimes even open hostility.

You have to make sure you get enough things in front of your customer that your pipeline is deep. You need a deep pipeline to ensure you have enough headroom to allow for the inevitable collapse of most of what you propose.

When you have, finally, got a deal on the table, you have to negotiate shrewdly in order to make sure you maximize your margins and extract the most value possible from your customer.

And in the end, ultimately, you then have to supervise every aspect of delivery, making sure you balance your costs so you do the minimum amount of work possible. You do the minimum you can get away with because that makes economic sense and maximises your margin.

That you do all these things in spite  of the fact that they don’t help your customer makes the relationship part of what you do completely, utterly false.

Nonetheless, some of you do quite well. My observation is that only the cleverest, most charismatic, of enterprise salespeople fall into this category.  You are great actors, able to delude customers into thinking that you actually care about them. Whereas the reality is that you think firstly about your number and what you have to do to make sure you hit it.

Whether you are a good person or not, this sets you up to lie in every interaction with your customer. You don’t care about what they’re trying to achieve, you care about what you have to achieve.

I’m not critising you, mind. The way organisations are structured presently, both on sell and buy side, you are forced to behave this way because it makes the best economic sense.

But the question I’m asking is this: what if things were different. What if you truly made the customer the centre of your world? What if, actually, you stopped lying in your interactions with them?

The Great Lie of the Sales Relationship

“Lying?”, I hear you ask?

Yes, lying, and here is why I make the challenging proposition that most enterprise sales people are extremely skilled at acting out the lie of their work.

Consider again the list of things enterprise sales people do with which I opened this chapter, but this time do it in the context of a real relationship, lets say with a personal friend.

You have to build a strong and lasting bond so you can get the meetings you need to pitch in the face of disinterest. A real relationship is never founded on disinterest - it is based entirely on common interests. Your friend is a friend because of the commonality.

You have to get enough stuff in front of your customer to ensure you have a deep enough pipeline to sustain deals that don’t go anywhere. In a real relationship with a friend, you’d never do this. A real friend would come to a mutual agreement about some course of activity - just the one - and would follow it jointly with you to an outcome. Friends support each other, they don’t play a numbers game to ensure they get to a personal outcome.

You have to negotiate shrewdly to extract the maximum value from your customer. If your customer was a friend, you’d be more interested in giving away your stuff, because you know that your friend would return the value as a natural consequence of friendship.

And finally, doing the delivery, you spend all your time making sure you spend only that amount of money you need to keep things on the straight and narrow. That’s cheapness, in the context of friendship. Imagine telling your friend you’re going to spend as little on them as you can get away with! Doing the minimum possible is a long way from going the extra mile, which is what a true friend would do.

Of course, enterprise sales is not friendship, but you can see how the activities of the enterprise salesperson can easily get really false.

You can’t on the one hand say you are successful on the basis of the relationships you build, and then go on to do everything that would normally bring a relationship to its knees. That’s why the best enterprise sales people are such great actors: they can make a customer believe in the relationship whilst simultaneously optimizing the outcomes for themselves.
I'm still seeking enterprise sales horror stories from either the buy-side or the sell-side. Right now, I'm looking for anything that has to do with mismanagement of evidence (ie, when case studies or customer references, or POCs have gone wrong), and blow ups when vendors have pitched "innovation".

The final book will likely be out in a couple of months.

"The Lever" (def): A mystical, invisible handle you can pull to get crushed by a safe. A device often used in popular culture, especially in cartoon shows featuring comical adversaries and their booby-traps.

The top five signals you should pull "The Lever" include:

1. You have just been in a three hour meeting you thought was concluding. Then some bright spark pops up with three items of "any other business", each of which will take another three hours. Because they are more senior than you, smile sweetly and resign yourself. While you're waiting for the cobwebs to form and your beard to grow, you pull "The Lever" because being crushed by a safe is more stimulating than the alternative of propping your eyes up with matchsticks.
2. The startup time of your laptop is longer than that needed to get through the items of "any other business". When you question this, you are told everything is within the SLA. You pull "The Lever" to get crushed by a safe because the alternative is to make so many cups of tea you'd cause the local water pressure to drop in the pipes.
3. While you're waiting for the laptop, but before you pull "The Lever", you are confronted by a sales-guy who has a proposition so good you'll be "dying to hear about it". You pull "The Lever" and get crushed by a safe because you'd rather die without hearing about it.
4. You discover one morning that "The Lever" has been decorated with gold gilt and now has a sign attached inviting you to pull it every time you've achieved one of your goals. Someone senior has determined that a public display is a great way to motivate, so you pull "The Lever" to get the public display of being crushed whilst putting yourself out of your misery at the same time.
5. The top reason to pull "The Lever", however, is you discover the person with the "any other business", and who thinks that slow start up times are OK, and who decorated "The Lever" are the same person. Even knowing this, you go and pull "The Lever" to be crushed by a safe because you know if you fail to do it this time, they will next dream up a Button-That-Dumps-You-In-The-Piranha-Pond and conceal it in the "on" button of your slow-to-start laptop.
   

I do a lot of meetings with vendors. A lot of meetings. And, as you'll know if you've been reading here for any amount of time, I'm of the view that many of these meetings are (frankly) a waste of time. Not all of them, by any stretch, but a very sizable percentage.

I'm beginning to come to a realisation about this. Vendors who have always been vendors (i.e., they have never worked customer side) are usually quite poor at understanding the real issues customers face. They say they understand, but I don't think they really do.

I have no other way to explain the behaviours you get from them otherwise.

Anyway, I also do quite a few speeches to vendors giving the "customer perspective". Almost always, people come up to me afterwards to say that they didn't realise X, or hadn't considered Y, and that my material was really interesting.  I like to be candid in those talks, so I usually don't pull punches.

Anyway, since I completed The Little Innovation Book I thought I'd try to do something constructive about the vendor thing. Therefore, I've paused One Big Thing (my next innovation book for people who have only one shot at getting things done) and decided to write an insiders view of the enterprise sale for vendors. I don't really have a good title yet (suggestions welcome).

It'll be another short, 30k word work, split into commute-readable chapters.

So you can get an idea of where I'm going, what follows is an excerpt from Chapter 2, which is about the falsity of the relationship selling model.

I open the chapter by reproducing an exchange between an Account Director and myself in one company I worked for. It was a technology vendor, one that mainly sold bits of commodity tin. Here is part of the analysis I follow this with:
The second point of note from the exchange I had was the Account Director, whether it was deliberate or not, was setting up an adversarial situation inside our organization.

When IT (for example) has made a decision on something that is disadvantageous to a vendor, it is a fairly normal reaction to scramble to find someone with more power that will re-balance things back in the vendor’s favour. There are strong economic motives for doing this, of course.

When a deal goes the wrong way, the potential loss of revenue can be huge. That is revenue that has to be made up elsewhere, and means that new deals have to be put on the table quickly if the Account Director is to make up their number at the end of the year.

From the perspective of the Account Director, trying to stop this happening makes excellent economic sense. For most selling organizations, the number of opportunities to make the number is essentially finite. Wasting any of them can have drastic consequences for end of year compensation.

Then, too, it may be that there is a real belief that the customer is making a mistake. In this case, in the name of the “doing the right thing for the customer”, you often see this behaviour occurring.

Whether or not the vendor is actually attempting to set up an internal confrontation, doing so is another example of the falsity of the relationship sales approach. In a true relationship, vendors would never dream of putting their partners in a situation where they are in the middle of a fight. Friends don’t do that to each other.

But the economic basis of relationship selling makes it very difficult to avoid. Faced with the certainty of a significant loss of money, or possibility of putting a relationship into a place from which it cannot recover, most Account Directors are forced to choose the latter.

After all, if they are good enough at their jobs - acting (that their primary concern is customers, not their targets) - it will be possible, given enough time and effort, to convince the customer that they really do  have their best interests at heart. A brilliant Account Director can make the choice of money over relationship time and time again and get away with it. Poor Account Directors, on the other hand, do so only once before they get thrown out by the customer.

Setting up adversarial relationships in accounts is an overt case of a much more common behaviour, known internally to the buy-side as “divide-and-conquer”. Vendors, usually with pretty good intentions, go around to as many people as they can making their pitch.

There will be a pretty varied reaction to this. Some people are open to a new proposition, and will be supportive. Most will be disinterested. And some will be openly dismissive.

By seeing as many influential people as they can,  vendors are able to maximize the opportunities they have to create a groundswell of demand for their offer. Indeed, this truly is a numbers game, because with enough meetings, it is possible to sell anything to a large organization by virtue of the fact that sooner or later, there will be enough people wanting it that a purchase is inevitable.

Divide and conquer is hated by the buy-side, because it creates a situation where things happen that are outside the strategic frame. The result is many smaller deals going on, which can add up to significant overspend over time. In one company I worked for, there were twice as many software licenses purchased as there were people in the organization.

This is demonstrably bad for the customer, and demonstrably very good for the vendor, of course. It is yet another example of where a decent account director will almost always trade relationship for revenue.
I'm planning to have the full book out in about 3 months. I'm still looking for any vendor horror stories - from either the buy or sell side - which can add some spice. I'll keep your identities and organisations confidential if you wish.

I'm in Malaysia presently speaking at a banking conference (civil service watchers - I've taken annual leave to do so).

A question I've just gotten is "what is necessary to make a bank go after radical innovation"? My answer was "you need to be staring death in the face".

This is true for most organizations, I think. Truly business radical, game changing innovations that affect core business almost never comes from large organisations who can sit happy on their current operations.

"But", I hear you ask, "what about Apple? What about Google. What about.. what about..?".

Notice that I said game-changing innovation that affect core business. Apple, with iPhone went after a new segment. Google, with Docs and so forth, are going after a new segment. They're not doing anything that disrupts where they got their money previously.

Banks, and to a lesser degree, the public sector are different. Bankers don't have any new segments they can go after. They go after incremental innovations that let them do more of the same, certainly, but you either are a banking customer or you're not. And for public sector, you are a customer, whether you want to be or not.

In both cases, there is no reason to change anything unless you're facing a crisis of titanic proportions and your back is against the wall. You have to innovate because there are no other options available. If you fail to pull something out of the bag, its game-over.

Banking had it's crisis, but conveniently got a bit of a boost from the public sector. This meant it dodged the "do or die" transformation it might otherwise have been faced with. Whether that was the right thing or not, I won't comment on. But let's face facts. There will likely be no radical transformation of the banking service offer, because profits are returning and "going back to basics" is a perfectly reasonable strategy in this scenario.

The same cannot be said of the public sector though, which has its back to the wall substantially. We will not be able to do the things we've done in the past the way we've done them, because the money to do so doesn't exist. Ergo, we are forced into new ways of doing things, whether the entrenched hierarchy likes it or not.

Here is the conclusion I draw from all this. If you want to be an innovator, and you want to make a real difference, you can only go to organizations in crisis. They are the ones that are forced into changes rather than choosing to adopt changes. No-one chooses to change without a good reason.

Picture this: you have a string of big projects, and all of them are expensive. All of them are late, and everyone is getting pretty fed up. You keep hearing stories of small, nimble organisations who, startup-like, produce miracles on a shoestring. And you look at them jealously, but no matter what you try, you just can't seem to get that kind of performance for yourself.

This is the problem with almost all development shops where there is Big-IT. Big-IT is characterised by big processes, big budgets, and very, very big projects. It is also characterised by big overruns, and significant budget-blow outs.

It is a problem which is magnified in Government. I say that knowing that doing so will likely get me into quite a bit of trouble. I do it anyway, because now is the first time in ages that there's a chance to change things.

Just why is it that Big-IT always fails to perform well when it comes to delivering big pieces of functionality?

Here's my view. If you want to build a small house, you can put down a concrete slab for a foundation and get started. If you want to build a skyscraper, you dig deep holes, put in very comprehensive foundations, and install significant infrastructures up and down the building to make sure nothing falls down. If you want to build an elevator to orbit, practically the whole building will be supporting infrastructure, and there'd going to be precious little space for anything useful for people.

In Big-IT, we almost always build elevators to orbit, especially in outsourced environments. Outsourcers love these things because all the governance, security, test, and process groupies allow them to sell way more hours than they'd be able to otherwise. They're hardly going to turn up for small projects, now, are they?

In Government, practically all IT projects are big. My argument, though, is that now is a good time to try something very different. Lets build lots of little projects without all the supporting infrastructures and administration first, and then worry about the infrastructure we must have after. Let us let projects get big only after we've proved that whatever-it-is works.

This is a tried approach,  known as a Skunkworks. Government needs a Skunkworks, and it needs one badly.

We need one badly because the entrenched ways of doing things - which have worked reasonably well for decades - have stopped working now. It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that groups of citizens, some with practically no training, can build stuff in days that takes Government years and costs millions. Fact is, those millions simply aren't available any more.

A Skunkworks would let us try new things, and more particularly, let us try new ways to do new things. It would also let us fail cheaply and quickly.

This last will be the hardest thing for civil servants to accept, of course, because failure is a very, very dirty word. But quick and cheap failure is really spectacular success. Failures of this kind teach lessons,  letting you move on to the right way of doing things more quickly.

My guess is  a Skunkworks which celebrated rapid and cheap failure would have significant economic upside, actually. If even 10% of the things it tried worked and produced value, I rather think that those few things would pay many times over for all the failures that went before.

Not to mention that those things would happen quickly.

What's stopping us spooling up a Skunkworks? Nothing but the momentum which continues to carry us down the old path. It's inertia, but, as I said, we're at the dawn of something new. Personally, I'm confident that all manner of  things which would have been difficult before will now become possible.

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