The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies…

The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies – And How to Break Them, by Jagdish Sheth. 

In The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies, Dr. Jagdish N. Sheth looks at success in business, through the lens of habit, to provide important insights into how “success courts its own demise.” The book is offered as an answer to the question: “Why do good companies fail?”

According to Dr. Sheth, successful companies often acquire self-destructive habits that eventually undermine their success. Although his research has uncovered an exhaustive list, he found seven, which he believes are crucial to avoid: (1) denial, (2) arrogance, (3) complacency, (4) competency dependence, (5) competitive myopia, (6) territorial impulse, and (7) volume obsession.

Like Stephen R. Covey, in his classic bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, this author sees habits as powerful, consistent, and often unconscious patterns that “produce our effectiveness or [in this case] our ineffectiveness.” But, also like Covey, he believes that habits can be broken—learned and unlearned, not with a quick fix, but with a process and a tremendous commitment.

Traits of a good Enterprise Architect…

Ok, so for years now I’ve been an architect, and I’ve run across my share of people whom regardless of their titles I would consider great architects and those that despite their titles I would never consider real architects.  What makes an architect an architect?

I have come up with a handful of clues that I use, but pasted below is an excellent summary that I have come to admire (and edited, as ‘tis my blog!)

Pasted from http://www.enterprise-architecture.info/EA_Certification.htm

 

What personal characteristics, knowledge, and skills are most commonly found in effective enterprise architects? Although not at all intuitive, several traits are even more important than knowledge of enterprise architecture.

 

To select the right people, hiring managers and EA team leaders must understand the most important competencies to seek in enterprise architect candidates. We have observed that the wrong people attempting to apply the right process will still struggle to make it work.  It is critical to spend time engaging the right people for this important function. As META Trends states, by 2008, 40% of enterprise architects will have primary expertise in business strategy or process engineering and may no longer be found within the IT organization. This reflects the rising importance of the enterprise business architecture and the need for a more balanced skill set (beyond technical architecture).

 

Key Characteristics of Enterprise Architects

• Enthusiastic: A passion for life, work, and EA goes a long way.  Far too many architects are rendered much less effective simply due to a lack of enthusiasm in their communication about EA.

• Technology-(ag)nostic: Unfortunately, many strong technical people are also quite biased in their views toward vendors/products and tend to “go with what they know.”  Architects must be vendor/product-neutral and maintain an objective perspective.

• Technology Generalists: It is important to understand enough about the broad range of technologies that an architect can engage in discussion with technical experts and not be swayed by inappropriately biased personal agendas in technical decisions.

• Well-respected and influential: Architects need the support of senior IT and business managers and the ability to influence them as well as the IT organization at large.  Those that are already well respected and have influence have an advantage.  New hires must establish this credibility early.  It should be noted that influential persons are not always in management positions.

• Able to represent a constituency: Members of an EA team have a constituency - part of the organization they represent in the process.  Some individuals are too focused on their own agenda to properly represent others. Although it is fine to assertively share an individual opinion, he or she must yield to the position that best represents and serves his or her constituents.

• Articulate and persuasive: Enterprise architects must spend substantial time communicating and educating.  Therefore, it is important that they have the skills to clearly communicate ideas in a persuasive, compelling manner.

• Positively persistent: Enterprise architects are strategically inspired change agents.  People tend to resist change (in most areas), and we certainly find this with the behavioral change being introduced by an EA program.  Therefore, it is critical to be persistent in pursuit of positive transformation.

• Possess a Good Dynamic Intellectual Range: Effective enterprise architects have the rare ability to zoom out and be able to conduct a worthwhile discussion about business strategy with the CEO and, a minute later, be in a technical expert’s office with a zoomed-in mindset discussing technical details without getting lost.

• Strategic: Strategic ideas are, by definition, those that contribute to defining or fulfilling the transformations described in the business strategy of the enterprise while tactical issues pertain to executing well with operations.  Architects must be strategically driven, while recognizing the need to have balance in the organization with effective, tactical operations.

• Focused on what is truly best for the organization (limited personal agendas): Although it is human nature to have a personal agenda, the best enterprise architects are leading or participating in an EA process designed to yield whatever will best serve the enterprise (even at the discomfort on one or many along the way).

• Knowledgeable of the business: It is important to avoid the trap of technology for the sake of technology.  Enterprise architects are leaders and therefore must have a strong interest in and understanding of the business, its strategic direction, dysfunctions, strengths, etc.  It is not good enough to be a superior technologist.

• Able to facilitate: Enterprise architects are frequently counted on to facilitate content development meetings or lead subcommittees.  In this capacity, effective group facilitation skills are important.

• Able to negotiate: It is important to seek the win-win positions/solutions on issues as architecture content is developed.  There are difficult decisions to be made.  Emotion can get in the way.  Effective negotiation skills are invaluable for peacefully resolving these situations with powerful decisions to benefit the organization.

• Focused on the long term: The idea is to take a series of short-term steps that not only deliver near-term value, but also contribute toward achieving a longer-term vision for the enterprise.  This demands focus on identifying and driving toward that longer-term goal.

• Able to effectively use the whiteboard: Architects are visual people and tend to feel compelled to draw diagrams in their communication.  Some people even like to use this reality in interview techniques.

• Able to lead: Taking the initiative to persuade, inspire, motivate, and influence others, plus the ability to make quality decisions with a high level of stakeholder buy-in.

• A Learner - Able to be taught: It should be noted that a strong understanding of EA is not on this list.  This is not an oversight.  We have learned that if a person possesses all or most of the aforementioned traits, and he or she is “teachable,” then he or she can learn EA best practices quickly and rapidly become effective.

Bottom Line: Managers/executives must focus on seeking the right mix of knowledge/skills in filling enterprise architecture full-time or part-time roles. Most of these key characteristics are non-technical.

 

Business Impact: When the right people are selected to fill enterprise architecture roles, the time to business value from enterprise architecture is improved and much more likely sustained.

 

The only thing missing is “Must Like Legos”, what do you think?

In search of knowledge, finding exabytes of opportunity…

Exformation Field – the subset of data generally thought to be explicitly discarded.

Exformation as a verb – the act of transforming industries by purposely expanding the venn diagram of information to include previously discarded data and meta-data also known as exformation.

Tor Nørretranders

The New Mobile Money Manifesto

Here’s what I’m thinking about for my new on-going thesis and dissertation for computer science, informatics and economics.

The Networked Economy - Metcalfe’s Law

The Economics of Networking

The Action behind the Transaction

The MetaData behind the Data

The Value of the Insight & Context vs. the act of Processing

The Democratization of the Tools of Finance

Financing the Tools of Democratization

Free Enterprise Unleashed

Modern Social Networking: More than "just friends" (FOAF and beyond)

Modern Money: Payment Acceptance & Remittance

Money is and always has been a "killer app" (more likely, the best "peacful app")

Payment is just half of the Equation.

Acceptance is key.

Modern Mobility: Wireless & The Anywhere Prosumer

Mobile Trends

Prosumerism Today

Mobile Freedom

Modern Identity: Quintuple Convergence

EVI, PHR and InfoCards, Oh My!

Modern Incentives: Inverting Loyalty & Rewards

These aren’t your daddy’s Airline Miles or Hotel Points.

The Traditional Loyalty Paradigm

Affinity vs. Loyalty:  Your Reputation with Me vs. My Reputation with You.

Modern Reputation: Radicalizing Transparency

Free Enterprise, Free Information and the Freedom to Choose with whom to do business.

Addressable Funds and Payment Attribution

IP6, Externally addressable subaccounts and micropayments for the masses.

Information Theory - The Data Value Hierarchy

Data, Exformation/Information, Knowledge/Context, Wisdom/Insight

Transactional Data: Our I/O Problem

Information & Exformation

Exformation as Noun (Non-captured Data)

Exformation as Verb (in detail later)

Context & Knowledge

Wisdom & Insight

High-fidelity Exformation Fields

Payment tone: Value Exchange Criteria

Incentive Insight: Multi-party Loyalty

Purchase intent: Leveraging Search to Purchase

Reputational Awareness: Prosumer Profiles

Brokered Identity, Trust & Integrity

Anonymity, Demography and Loyalty Redefined

FOAF: Social Banking

Shared Cash Flow Management (CFM)

Shared Risk & Reward, Combinational Agoric Budgeting

Subscribable Personas

Never "lose" a customer again!

Extreme KYC

OfferTree: When goods and services companies compete, you win!

Exformation as Verb: The Exformation of Industry

Exformation Example #1: Healthcare, Providers, Pharma, Networks & Insurers

Exformation Example #2: Customer Value Management (CVM=CRM+Loyalty+Reputation+Transparency)

Exformation Example #3: Future Bank - Yes, there is still a need!

Exformation Example #4: Future Commerce - Globalization Realized

Exformation Example #5: Campus Collaboration - The Future of Education

Exformation Example #6: A smaller, gentler, little brother - Government as Required

Upon being a Methodology Exponent…

‘Tis a funny thing, being cursed with Methodology Knowledge, Experience and Passion.  As my favorite methodology joke goes: (Ok, so how many methodology jokes do YOU know?)

“Do you know the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist?”

“You can negotiate with a terrorist.”

At IBM, I was what was known as a Methodology Exponent.  This means that I helped create, vett and consolidate our disparate methodologies into what eventually transformed from what was loving known as the Worldwide Integrated Solution Development and Delivery Methodologies (WISDDM, pronounced Wisdom) into the Global Services Method (GSM)

Exformation

If you haven't already seen the viral web video presentation called "Shift_Happens", you might not agree with the statement, "We live in Exponential^Times" but consider this fact:

It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10^18) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year.

...And that's just the INformation!

The world is full of data that is often never processed, stored or captured.  Tor Nørretranders began using the term in 1997.  In the domain of data, the universe of all possible data includes that which is captured, stored or processed as INformation.  Everything else would be the EXformation.

I propose a verb version of the word as in, the exformation of industries, meaning transforming more of the universe of data for a given industry into information.  I believe this is a crucial capability necessary to manifest real-time transparent reputations in the new world economy.

There are many companies in the business of processing payment information.  Sure, my company actually moved over US $2.5 Trillion in 2008, at roughly $ 77k per second by processing over 20 Billion transactions.  That’s impressive, but consider this…

90% of the people who physically change residences move with OUT reporting a change of address are past due or delinquent on their accounts.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, looks to Google's future as "targeted personalization" and he posits, "Why not deliver products to the end customer directly?"

Self-service and more personalized services seemingly require more "knowledge" of the customer.

We have been tremendous beneficiaries of both Moore’s and Metcalfe's Laws, but are our personal lives really that much better?

Ok, I give, let's collaborate...

I've been advocating for some time now about the need for folks to be able to collaboratively contribute and sharpen the intellectual sword as it were with blogs, even if only as a draft development means of production.  Well, here we are.  And not being aware of anything else similar, this is it.  This is where we can rant and rave and otherwise pontificate and I can ease some of my manic tendencies, OCD, ADHD and futuristic technology latency frustrations through the miracle therapy of blogging.  Welcome to the blogosquare.  Not yet quite a sphere in that it is very rough around the edges and not exactly as perfectly "mashable" as those round things out there in the wild...  Here I will blog on mt thesis, new products, services, technologies, competition, education, current business or government initiatives and anything else that makes sense to be here...
Frankly, (har) I could use y'alls help.  I don't need to be the author of all of these ideas, I don't need to create or write everything and I don't need to take all of the credit, but I do want to start to flesh out these ideas and start to push the envelope a bit more in earnest...
Here's where my head is at today, Monday, March 16th, 2009:

1. A Next Generation Vision of the future of payments
2. The Exformation of Industries: Select Business Examples (Healthcare, Banking, Loyalty, Entertainment & Travel)
3. Global Payments - Perfecting a Universal Processing Solution
4. Unified & Self-Directed Communications, Universal Alerts & Notifications
5. Seamless User Experiences – Introduction to U/X
6. Searchable & Self-Managed Enterprise Channel & Integration
7. Componentized Business Services & Common Data Model
8. Open Standards & Global Thought Leadership
9. Process Optimization & Workflow Automation
10. Contactless Tipping Points... We really are ready for contactless in the States
11. Connectivity Autonomics & Proactive Monitoring
12. Customer Centricity & Prosumer/Producer Profiles & Real-time Reputation Transparency
13. New Commercial Services including Automagic Expenses
14. 9-D Security & The Quintuple Convergence of Global Identities
15. Mobile Acquiring - Retail MPOS ain't what they used to be...
16. Mobile Context & Pervasive Awareness
17. Payments as a Service - Introducing "PaymentTone"
18. Addressable Funds (Smart, Routable, Private, Ffinancial Instruments)
19. Flexible Account Aggregation (Dynamic, Decoupled, Advanced Hybrid Wallets)
20. The Foundation for the Future of Commerce and International Business in the Cloud

Anything else anyone want to work on?