as Published in Forbes.com As companies move inexorably to ecosystem business models, this drives many changes in how we conduct business. One of the more elusive aspects of these new models is evaluating how we know they are working. How do we measure success, and what KPIs indicate a healthy ecosystem? Traditional metrics used for [...]
as Published in Forbes.com - Even before Covid-19, many leaders often commented that we were experiencing a disruptive business climate. Oh, little did we know. This climate has often been called VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The phrase started with the U.S. Military to describe the new world order or rather disorder after the [...]
Not only are we in an age of ecosystems, but we are also in an age of growing awareness of corporate social responsibility. With this is a commitment to treating all workers with respect and dignity, ensuring safe working conditions and conducting environmentally responsible, ethical operations. That commitment commonly extends to expectations in the supply [...]
As recently published in Forbes.com Finding your "North Star" is a concept co-opted from agile methodology. The North Star in this context is a vision or goal that provides guidance to fast-moving, self-directed, agile teams. As agile has expanded its influence from teams to enterprises, the concept of a guiding North Star becomes crucial in [...]
Small businesses have been unusually hard-hit in these uncertain times. The dynamics of the partner ecosystem is that most of the partners are small business and they serve small businesses. Being a small business myself, I know how precarious cash flow can be. Many of these businesses are seeing their revenues shut down as their [...]
Building a partner ecosystem is hard. But what's harder than building an ecosystem? Building a culture that supports an ecosystem strategy. I spoke with one executive who was responsible for building the partner ecosystem at a well-known payroll processor, and our discussion perfectly illustrated this challenge. The executive's decades-old company was expanding beyond payroll processing [...]
or How to Build to Build Partner Ecosystems for Agility, Innovation and Growth in Your Business as published in Forbes.com. As someone who has been architecting and managing business partner ecosystems for more than 30 years in the tech industry, I am quite interested in the attention ecosystems have been receiving from management pundits of [...]
Measuring Channel Ecosystem Health? And Why do I Care? I recall the first time I spoke about a “partner ecosystem” in 1999 to my boss, a long time direct sales manager. He looked at me like I was a tree hugger. Today, we frequently talk about our partners collectively as an ecosystem; yet there are [...]
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting Group, June 2009 Social media is gaining presence within partner ecosystems These are natural communities and naturally lend themselves to these media.There has been a trend for some time by large vendor companies to position themselves as the hub in a vendor-centric partner ecosystem. Most have built [...]
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting GroupOf the 20 partner managers we interviewed, most were realizing productive benefits from the use of social media. Benefits were described in terms of strengthening relationships versus the hard metrics of generating leads and revenue.Yet as many of the activities were integrated into the process of doing [...]