Cover image for The Business Bottleneck

The Business Bottleneck

Author Michael Cote
Release Date: 2020/03/01
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Book Description

Many mainstream companies are striving to adopt the “tech company” business model established over the past two decades by Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Look no further than the way The Home Depot, Allianz, DICK'S Sporting Goods, Ford, and Daimler do business today. These companies are taking the tech company approach by focusing on product development and management.

In this report, author Michael Coté (Monolithic Transformation) shows business people how to accelerate their company’s digital transformation. Software is at the center of how tech-company businesses operate, how they innovate, and how customers interact with them. But as this report explains, becoming a tech company isn’t primarily a tech issue; it’s become a business problem. That’s where the bottlenecks exist.

You’ll examine:

  • The finance bottleneck: How forecasts, plans, and commits often fail in the chaos of business and software development
  • The strategy bottleneck: Why tried-and-true approaches to corporate strategy are a poor fit for digital-driven business
  • The leadership bottleneck: Why leadership, concerned with success and sustainability, is powerless to change how people operate
  • Case studies: How Duke Energy and other businesses have adapted to short software cycles

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction: Be Like a Tech Company
  2. 1. The Business Bottleneck
    1. Business and Software Development Is Chaos
    2. The Small-Batch Cycle
  3. 2. The Finance Bottleneck
    1. The Business Case Is Wrong from the Start
    2. Starting Ignorant Can Be an Asset
    3. Small-Batch Finance
    4. Business Cases Focused on Growth, Not Costs
    5. Finance’s Small-Batch Imperative
  4. 3. The Strategy Bottleneck
    1. A Moment of Pedantry
    2. Getting Over Digital Transformation Fatigue
    3. Sensing Your Market
    4. Know Your Customer
      1. Case Study: “The Front Door of the Store Is in Your Pocket”—Home Depot
    5. Consider Cassandras
    6. Try New Things
    7. Validation with Small-Batch Strategy
      1. Case Study: Most Viable Strategy: Duke Energy Validates RFID Strategy14
  5. 4. The Leadership Bottleneck
    1. Vision
    2. Enshrine Urgency: Always Run in the Yellow
    3. All the Feels: A Note on Positive Motivation
    4. Leading Failure
    5. Organization Structure, or, Plato Never Worked at an Enterprise
      1. A Simple but Overly Cute Fix
      2. The Best Ways to Spread the Improvement Virus
      3. Introducing New Roles into the Team
    6. Strategy from the Nerds
      1. Case Study: When Vans Are Cars
    7. Do You Still Need an IT Department?
      1. Product Managing IT
    8. Understanding Tech
      1. Managing Upward
      2. Find yourself a secret nerd
      3. Case in Point: Technical Debt
    9. Metrics: Managing Like a Tech Company
      1. Eye-Balling It
      2. Technical Metrics
      3. Business Value Metrics
      4. Culture Metrics
  6. 5. Conclusion
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