Tag: Cultural Change

I’m very excited to announce that today is the official publication date of my latest book, War & Peace & IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age. It is intended as the hitherto missing book for senior enterprise executives on how best to work with their technology organizations to accomplish their digital […]

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, […]

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 […]

As an Enterprise Strategist at AWS I get to work with executives from the world’s largest organizations as they drive digital transformation efforts. What may come as a surprise is that we tend to talk less about the technology and more about the people, processes, and culture needed to enable business transformation. A couple of […]

You might say that humility is the essence of digital transformation. In the digital world, we are willing to be surprised and to learn. In the old days, we relied on a plan—prepared in advance—to guide our activities. The plan was made by someone, or some collection of someones, who knew enough to specify what […]

Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining & Resources, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Thomas Blood, AWS Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist Until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in Colorado. I have a fondness for mining, based on the stories my father shared with me about the people who extract […]

There’s been a lot of industry buzz about digital transformation but little clear information about what it means. What does it mean to be “digital?” How different is it from what we do today? How much of a transformation does going “digital” require? What is clear is that the pace of innovation, change, and disruption […]

    If your enterprise is undertaking a transformation, then you will need to help your employees develop new skills. That makes sense—your employees are probably very good at doing whatever you have done in the past, and transformation, by definition, is something new. You could bring in new employees who already have the new […]

In a previous blog post, I talked about how to drive top-down change in an enterprise, and how to take advantage of command-and-control authority even in an Agile setting. In this post, I’ll talk about a particular technique that draws on authority. It is the change management approach called “Shu-ha-ri,” a concept drawn from the […]