“Strategic pivot” has been a fashionable buzzword for several years. Now wildly over-used, it can be misleading and cause poor decision-making by investors, entrepreneurs, and management teams. So I thought it was high time to try to define what a successful pivot looks like versus a wasteful flail.
Since Amazon’s Q3 earnings announcement, AWS (Amazon Web Services), has been grabbing more headlines than ever. The nine-year old unit is breaking records as the dominant cloud infrastructure services provider, rapidly becoming a default choice for enterprise and government organizations. How have they pulled this off, and can anyone give AWS a run for its money?
What is the outlook for this largest-ever merger of tech companies, assuming that it goes through without any major hitches? The history of prior mega-mergers tell a mixed story. What is there about this one, between two ailing giants, that could be different?
Philip Lay spent two decades as an account executive, general manager and entrepreneur, before becoming a strategy advisor and managing director with The Chasm Group in 1995.
Today Philip is visiting professor at IESE business school in Barcelona and serves on a public-company board alongside his advisory activities with boards, CEOs and management teams.
Major clients include Autodesk, Compuware, HP, NetApp, Rackspace, SAP, and Salesforce.com.
