Wednesday was the launch party for The Power to Predict, a new book by Vivek Ranadive, CEO of TIBCO. If you’ve never heard of him then I’m not surprised. TIBCO is a software engineering company of the ‘old school’ type with close links to Stanford University, one of the real boiling pots for serious technology rocket science. TIBCO does the heavy lifting involved in large scale enterprise integration. I also do work for TIBCO from time to time and in the book, I’m credited as the lead researcher.
Essentially the book is a collection of stories covering a broad spectrum of industries and their efforts to see the next thing that is likely to impact their business, take corrective action or seize opportunity. It includes companies like Pirelli, casino giant Harrah’s, Spanish ex-pat bank Solbank, FedEX, Southwest Airlines, amazon.com, E&J Gallo Winery, Essent Energie. I wish they could have talked about a host of others I came across but am not allowed to mention. Believe me when I say TIBCO has a customer list to die for. More important are the characteristics these companies share:
- Customer-driven – not focused but driven
- Embrace cultural change – they don’t fight change
- Management by exception – the routine stuff is assumed to be taken care of
- Innovation – they don’t shy away from change
- Merit-based alliances – there’s no entitlement in a relationship
- Meritocratic and entrepreneurial – no consensus here
- Leaders provide opportunity – organizing staff to empower themselves
- Short planning cycles – event driven and highly responsive to market conditions
These are all characteristics I believe the modern professional practice should aspire to if it is to be super successful.
I wasn’t at the launch party – (the Asian Art museum in San Francisco was a bit of a trek.) I was having a party of my own at An Shabheen, the best Irish bar in Javea. I’d received my copy of the book the same day and a chap who knows nothing about technology had a glance at the back cover, a few pages of the intro and a page out of a chapter on The Predictive Battlespace. Rick is a young Australian barman who knows nothing about technology and cares even less. His idea of fun is surfing. But he was so enthralled with what he saw he asked where to buy a copy. So I’m really, really proud. Because someone just ‘got it.’ (no IBM Global Services required) from the work the whole team put in to demystifying the road to competitive advantage.
Tom Foremski gives the book a great bigging up. Good stuff.
PS – I should have said this. If you’d like to learn the lessons these kinds of company can teach us, I’d recommend getting the book. It’s about 200 pages, very little geek speak, beautifully written, easily digestible – the way management books are supposed to be. And no – I don’t make a penny on book sales.
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