Leadership and Strategy are inseparable…

I was reading the popular new arrival 'The Strategist' by Cynthia Montgomery of Harvard Business School. It was quite an interesting reading, particularly the concepts that tightly link Leadership and Strategy.

• If you are a leader (or commander in military terms), then you must strategize. You must be the central point of your company's purpose and strategy [Purpose is the reason why your business exists and strategy is the means to achieve the purpose]
• The leader can always take the help of functional or industry experts or even consulting firms while incubating the strategy. But at the end of the day, the leader takes responsibility for the strategy.
• The leader (or CEO practically) is the guardian of the purpose of the organization. That tells Chief Executive Officer is Chief Strategy Officer too.
• Owning the strategy means owning the responsibility. The leader gets the credit or curse because she owns the strategy
• Strategy is never been a finished product, it's a journey that the leader and the organization must live through. If a company thinks the strategy as a product or job (that is, it has a 'finished state' or 'end date') , then the organization will lose its purpose and become irrelevant
• The leader is mindful of the strategy all the time, maps each and every activity in her organization to the strategy, makes subtle (sometimes drastic too) refinements to the strategy continuously.
• The main thing that differentiates a leader and a manager is strategy
• The main thing that differentiates a CEO and a COO is strategy
• Though the leader consults his top team while carving out the strategy, still the leader has a blue print of the strategy on her mind even before calling the team for discussion
• If you are not a strategist, you cannot be the leader
• Concept of 'Super Manager' is a myth. Jack Welch of GE was touted as the 'manager of the century'. He did great things because he was a great strategist too. After he took over he sold close to 100 of GE's businesses because they were not making great margins for GE. He invested the money got through the selling on cutting edge businesses where GE had a definite differentiator.
• Even Steve Jobs is basically a strategist. Though he was celebrated for his technical brilliance and small but refreshing ideas, he was a strategist. As a strategist, he got a few failures and a few successes. Only thing, his successes are really game changing  and path breaking  that took the focus out of his failures.

Nobody likes to work in an organization which doesn't have or doesn't know the purpose. When there is no purpose, there is no strategy too, isn't it? 

NASSCOM session on Enterprise Mobility

Last week, I had an opportunity to listen and interact with 2 genial entrepreneurs, Umesh Sachdev- CEO of Uniphore Software Systems and Venkat Rangan- CEO of INXS Technologies in the NASSCOM organized 'Enterprise Mobility' session. Both the companies are striving in the mobile space, with their very much unique and niche offerings and I hope they are reasonably successful. Here there are some highlights...

For many people, enterprise mobility means checking their emails in the BlackBerry, even now. Better not to talk about India where the smart phone penetration is still at 10~15%. Those smart phones are mostly in the hands of Gen-Y, who have nothing to do with enterprise mobility at least as of now. So if you are a smart phone enterprise app developer who operates in the Indian markets, then Dude, your time is yet to come. But if you are ready to write apps for those devices that are not that 'smart' then you have huge potential in India.

 It's not that foreign enterprises are bullish on mobility in this economy, there exists a few road blocks that need to be effectively addressed by the mobile technical community so that enterprise IT departments confidently venture into mobility

• Lack of awareness: which is the biggest barrier in terms of security, mobile device management etc.

• Security: There are some valid concerns like unencrypted GPRS, corporate data out of the network and falling into the hands of competitors, remote wiping of enterprise data
• Compliance and Regulatory stuff: Most regulatory bodies are not exactly happy with classified data available out of the corporate networks
• Mobile Device Management (MDM): At least there are 100+ companies claiming they have sophisticated components to manage the device life cycle and security, but MDM domain itself needs more maturity
• Mobile Apps Management (MAM): Native apps distribution is still a nightmare with enterprises need to have their apps in the app store or market place and supporting different versions of the apps in the different devices

• Adoption & Training: Training is virtually impossible, this problem domain will have to be addressed by the 'No training only intuitive design' philosophy 

Other than the road blocks, there were some other interesting points discussed.

• In their opinion, mobile web apps are no match for intuitive native apps despite the HTML5 excitement.  But some people couldn't agree to that, they have seen mobile web apps even manipulating local devices like camera

•  'Write once, run anywhere' strategy never worked for them. They tried to target all the platforms at once using popular translation tools and every time they were not able to meet a critical business requirement

• There are 2300+ form factors and countless devices. So think and choose clearly before you start your development- what platforms, devices and form factors that you are going to support

• Choose the right candidate apps for mobile. Selecting a wrong app would push your mobile strategy back to years. Heavy apps should be avoided, even with a strong middleware.  Mobiles have data caps and low download speeds

• Write 'good citizen' apps that take less memory, consume lower bandwidths, clear the isolated storage space as and when not needed, utilize low battery power etc. etc.
• BYOD may look like reducing the cost initially, but will backfire when you need to support different devices and versions and you need to struggle with a score of rogue apps that don't care your corporate policies