We have all heard the saying, and I am willing to bet that most of us have even said it to
others, or inserted it in a presentation. Yet I realized that, while everyone seems to
understand this on an academic level, none of us seem to understand it intuitively. In
particular, we are very bad at understanding the full effects of culture, or taking it into
account when we are making decisions on a day to day basis. And above all, we wave culture
away, thinking that our strategy will overcome any…
These days I find myself in regular discussions about company growth, primarily with startups that are getting traction
and now need to step up to the next level. The discussions typically cover all the usual scaling topics, but
until recently pretty much ended there. About 2 weeks ago, however, I had once more such a discussion, but
this one went beyond the scaling challenges, and moved on to a different kind of growth: maturity. This is quite analogous
to human growth, where only part of the…
It seems that everywhere you look, companies are looking to create near-shore and off-shore partnerships, to
increase their software development capacity and reduce costs. Interestingly, this is not limited to large
companies; more and more SMEs are joining in. At the same time, we now have over a decade of experience
with this topic in the industry, and have learned some hard-earned lessons. It seems not that long ago that companies were pulling
back from off-shoring due to a significant number…
