Tag: Change Leadership

In this next installment of Ahead in the Cloud we talk to Kareen Boutonnat, the COO of Lightsource BP. Earlier in my career I received a piece of advice very similar to the one she mentions: always hire people better than you. It’s important to keep in mind even as we all struggle with a […]

This blog is adapted from a conversation with Tom Brewer, Head of Service Creation, UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, and Matthew Lewis, Chief Architect, UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, moderated by Mark Schwartz, Director, Enterprise Strategy, AWS. The discussion, which was a part of the European Government Delegation Programme at re:Invent 2018, focused on how governments can […]

Our enterprise strategy blog—like the rest of Amazon and AWS—is oriented around the expressed needs of our customers. We write about the issues and challenges facing the enterprises we meet with, and try our best to give them new ways of framing problems, of anticipating the future of IT, of thinking about the cloud and […]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing highlights from my conversations with seven leaders around their perspectives on innovation at scale when it comes to people and organization. Our dialogues with these leaders, from both commercial enterprises and the public sector, explore how these individuals cultivate next level leaders, how they deal with failure, […]

Recently, I sat down with seven leaders from both commercial enterprises and the public sector to hear how they approach developing a culture that enables innovation at scale. In a series of video interviews, we discussed the different roles that technology, people, and culture play as C-level executives navigate their organizations through the cloud journey. […]

Last month, we published a series of video interviews with C- level executives on their approaches to people and culture, while leading their organizations through the cloud journey. In this blog series I’m summarizing these perspectives, to share what I think are key lessons from these insightful discussions. In my last blog, I focused on the theme […]

When I joined AWS just over a year ago, I was introduced to the concept of a “bar raiser.” In every interview process for a new employee, someone is designated as the bar-raiser—the person who will make sure that the new employee raises the bar for whatever function they will be performing. The bar raiser […]

In previous blog posts I have described anti-patterns of enterprise IT that we often observe in enterprises we work with, and patterns of successful enterprise IT that are their antidotes. To make these patterns and anti-patterns more concrete, I will explain how they have played out at my old organization, US Citizenship and Immigration Services […]

An interesting question arose at one of my customer meetings recently. We were discussing the importance of innovation; in particular, how important it was for technology staff to stay abreast of new technologies to see whether they could add value to the enterprise. We agreed that current best practices suggest conducting rapid experiments to test […]

Enterprise leaders often ask us how to get started in digital transformation. The question usually comes after a discussion about the urgency of transformation and what a transformed enterprise looks like—the benefits of transformation and the business models it enables. At first, the journey seems long and involved; the changes dramatic and far-reaching. We often […]