Technocery — Writing

Cloud Exodus

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Companies across all industries began to exit the cloud last year and, despite widespread incredulity, have started a trend that is showing signs of accelerating this year. What's behind this great "public cloud repatriation" and why is a return to the Internet's origin story an inevitable opportunity to help clients be successful?

For the past decade, the public cloud drove digital transformation for organizations seeking to outsource their information technology to specialty third-parties. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, is among the largest of such providers that can handle the processing power for enterprise applications ("compute") as well as the corresponding data disk drive space ("storage"). In a sense, cloud computing represented a sound investment that was scalable and predictable for growing businesses.

But now we know it isn't.

What started at the end of the pandemic as a cost-saving trend has now ballooned into an spending-fueled existential crisis for the entire public cloud industry. Gartner's research vice president Sid Nag has recently observed that "CIOs are beyond the era of irrational exuberance of procuring cloud services" and instead need to be "thoughtful in their choice ... to drive specific, desired business and technilogy outcomes in their digital transformation journey."

The Cloud Cost Crisis

Businesses are now second-guessing the very executives who led them to the public cloud principally on account of just how expensive the public cloud is. Cloud computing has quickly become uncompetitive because of its runaway costs for two key reasons:

Cloud customers don't (and often can't) optimize for the cloud.
In order to take advantage of the economies of scale that the public cloud provides, cloud users need to factor in the consumption-based pricing of cloud usage and they don't. Every cloud client ultimately accepts the ballooning and runaway costs of compute and storage as inevitable, because it's how the industry prices its lucrative margins. But when everyone was working from home and leveraging cloud resources for every imaginable workload, eye-watering cloud bills simultaneously sounded the alarms of enterprises; 40% of respondents in IDG's Cloud Computing Survey cited an urgent need to control costs, and nearly all cloud customers lamented they had no idea how to model their use or forecast their consumption needs.

Source: IDG Cloud Computing Survey 2020

Applications need to be purpose-built for the public cloud's specific architecture, but few (if any) of them ever really are. (And "cloud native" is now largely considered marketing nonsense, which even cloud vendors themselves won't use.) So what most companies encounter is software that works just as well as it did when it was served either on-premise or in a company-managed data center or colocation facility. The widespread practice of "lifting-and-shifting" locally-built applications into the public cloud has resulted in none of the initially promised benefits of cloud being realized: from auto-scaling, security, and storage management for efficient workloads.
The price (and complexity) of running your own systems has plunged.
Over the past 10 years, the prices of hard drive storage, networking hardware, computer processors, power, and all peripherals have dropped by over 90%, but cloud computing costs have stayed the same or in some cases even gone up. There are certainly specialty edge-cases where vast amounts of custom-managed hardware, such as artificial intelligence compute for training data models used in generative automation, are best handled initially in the public cloud. But in nearly all typical business use cases, there is almost-immediate return on investment for moving enterprise workloads to your own hardware.

Services have built a sales practice around "manufacturing the disease and selling the cure," as Technocery Principal Robert Gibbons observes. But the cloud industry took this to an insulting extreme and some executives became "merchants of complexity" scaring people with the imaginary bogeyman that having a server "connected to the internet" is a danger. But creating closed and isolated systems that can be kept secure and easily updated is now a trivial part of setting up your own server that it hardly requires specialized training, nevermind programming certifications. Open source containers, like Docker, benefit from the core principle of being hardened by a million eyeballs looking in the same place. As 37signals' CTO David Hansson concludes, we are now in "a golden age of secure, baseline computing. We should be celebrating!" The principal pain points that cloud computing address (cost and complexity) are no longer relevant.

The Turn

Information technology leaders, who once praised cloud computing, have been quick to turn against it in recent months. Cloud computing advocate David Linthicum says that the cloud "is no longer a slam dunk." Service Integrators and Managers (SIAMs), like Zeus Cloud's CEO Mark Grindey, are advising their customers that "now is the time to build an in-house, on-premise" framework for business computing. Hansson even published a magisterial Big Cloud Exit FAQ chronicling his company's intentional move (and dramatic savings) from the cloud's hyperscalers to the software developer's traditional infrastructure which he argues was as driven by core values as it was by cost. And even before these splashy episodes, Dropbox saved $75 million by building its own tech infrastructure. These are all hardly outliers; they represent a growing trend of cloud repatriation to on-premises that continues to accelerate, which providers are encouraged to embrace.

We can help. As businesses consider how to manage the change associated with exiting the cloud - and quickly realizing the return-on-investment in doing so - a strategic approach to planning the exit will minimize disruption while maximizing benefits. There are several phases to consider in your own Cloud Exodus:

Hybridization
The term "hybrid cloud" is increasingly used to describe a business that utilizes a combination of both traditional on-premise technology solutions and cloud computing services. Hybridization is a likely phase in your organization's journey to savings and sensibility, and should prioritize the applications for quick wins. Enterprise servers that manage web hosting for internet and intranet sites, email exchanges with calendar and contact syncing, and even communication and collaboration productivity for video conferencing and telephony can all be quickly localized through primarily single-occurrence investments. Commercial services are also broadly portable and, when unbundled from public cloud providers, offer immediate savings without compromising on security.
Globalization
Disaster Recovery ("DR") and Content Delivery Networks ("CDN") ensure the sustainability and reachability of businesses' digital services to customers around the world. Layering industry expertise and leveraging proven experience, customers can benefit from a thoughtful and purposeful infrastructure design that prioritizes end-users and business outcomes. At the core of the unrealized public cloud promise of scale is a fallacy of its form: the largest cloud providers constitute single points of failure and more often than not experience dramatic outages that disable vast swaths of the internet. It is time to declare your independence and break free.
Specialization
There are undeniable specialty use cases for the cloud: isolated and time-limited, high-intensity workloads. Those should, as both Gartner and Forrester advise, be carefully considered with clearly defined business and technology outcomes driven by well understood use cases. Many of the failings of the public cloud's money pit stem from the Ron Popeil Showtime Rotisserie mindset of "set it and forget it" that accompanied poorly conceived or recklessly executed moves there in the first place. Carve out clear circumstances where the public cloud makes sense, from training your own artificial intelligence data models to building self-destructing test environments for rapid prototyping.

Like all undeniable trends, the incumbents are fighting tooth-and-nail to preserve the status quo. Amazon Web Services routinely publishes studies declaring that "cloud repatriation isn't a thing" and the other hyperscalers and their service providers, like Vercel, will dare you to connect to the internet like it's some sort of misadventure for the miseducated. Yet serious reflection of these arguments proves that they are fallacious and self-serving; at best, "you shouldn't leave the cloud" is a motte-and-bailey fallacy where the bailey is "the cloud is always cheaper" and the motte is "actually it's about agility." When a hyperscaler chooses a compelling argument because it's persuasive only to then retreat to a less compelling argument when it is assailed, you know it's an idea that is no longer innovative and it's time to leave it behind.

Cloud Governance
📄 One-Pager: Technocery Governance (.pdf)

Technocery's Transformations Services adopts a strategic and balanced approach to the Cloud, guiding organizations through the complexities of cloud adoption, ensuring alignment with business goals and regulatory mandates. Our Cloud Governance program focuses on cloud strategy and policy development (public, private, hybrid models), cost management and optimization (aligning spend with business outcomes), security and compliance in the cloud (industry regulations and data protection), and cloud repatriation strategy (transitioning from public cloud to hybrid and on-premises configurations).

Artificial Apotheosis

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The Year 2023 was typified by consumers and companies alike becoming enthralled with the possibilities of artificial intelligence: from generative AI that unlocked new levels of creativity and productivity, to delegative and autonomous workflows that are ushering in scale like never before seen. Is 2024 the year business becomes serious about synthetics?

In October 2022, signs of the Singularity jolted a technology sector that had been lulled into a post-pandemic malaise with excitement and energy. And yet throughout 2023, both the promise of artificial intelligence and the disruption of generative content resulted in the mass-disintermediation of organizations from their customers and constituents. Every software provider desperately rolled out an AI chatbot or API service in what could only be described as a disorganized and chaotic effort at not missing out on the marketing potential of the craze. None of these were special - unique or differentiated - and unsurprisingly, all have failed.

In the wake of mass layoffs stemming from the software industry's failures to truly reinvent themselves through artificial intelligence, and the rising risks borne of this radical moment as technology companies underwent disingenuous rebranding of their older automation tools as "AI," analysts are only now beginning to lean into the seriousness of what is at stake. The Catastrophe of OpenAI's near-collapse just weeks ago crystalized how so many sectors had begun to architect the facade of a future built upon ChatGPT, what IBM's Senior Vice President of Research Darío Gil warned earlier in the summer was "reducing the enterprise AI strategy to an API call." The real transformative work of reinventing businesses will require far more industry and courage in the face of terrifying and thrilling odds.

Confronting the Challenge

Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, which primarily dominates the digital age following the dot-com collapse at the start of the millennium, is confronted by its own demise in the face of artificial intelligence. SaaS products - from website builders and content management systems (CMS) to customer relationship management (CRM) systems and every application powering virtually every facet of our radically connected world - are little more than front-end interfaces that simplify the complexity that business users and retail consumers face in performing computational tasks. Whether it's shopping online, managing your bank account, or posting updates for your friends and family, people have reluctantly grown to tolerate (but not truly love) their experience with websites. In fact, an entire "digital detox" industry has arisen led by proponents such as Ariana Huffington, urging people to disconnect from the dangers of social media and the excesses of ecommerce. Nevertheless, SaaS has prevailed because other efforts to make the user experience more compelling - more timely, valuable, and relevant - have failed to catch on.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially generative AI (genAI) and the fast-arriving artificial general intelligence (AGI), are more than just the latest online fad. While the successive novelties of cryptocurrency, blockchain, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have each seen their red-hot ascent and terminal "winters," artificial intelligence is presenting a new and unprecedented interface to the human experience. It is for this reason that innovation analysts describe it as the most important invention since the printing press, and something that Microsoft's own engineers opine spells the end of software-as-a-service. If people are able to live, work, and play without having to avail themselves of outdated web-based interfaces, and can instead engage in human-like conversations and breathtakingly realistic creations that feel intuitive and natural, it spells certain doom for a SaaS industry that awakens to its own obsolescence. It's little wonder why the CEO of largest SaaS company Salesforce so cravenly tried to recruit OpenAI's engineers in what Fortune magazine called a "feeding frenzy." The path to prosperity in the software industry runs through the heart of artificial intelligence.

Architecting the Apotheosis

Generative AI has launched a massive wrecking ball into the legal and economic framework underpinning intellectual property, with most regulatory bodies struggling to even comprehend (let alone, come to terms with) the very nature of synthetics. In the most recent example of artists, writers, and musicians filing legal challenges to artificial intelligence, the New York Times sued OpenAI just days ago for using its content to train the models that are now used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Furthermore, the very models built upon decades of data freely available on the Internet face continual collapse as OpenAI's GPT and DALL-E, Midjourney, Runway, Pika, and many of the other nascent startups are striving to scale by training off of user-generated synthetic data to the point of hallucinogenic dysfunction, rendering their future suitability questionable.

The solution is straight-forward, argues Gil: enterprises must architect their artificial intelligence around their proprietary and private data. Rather than outsourcing generative AI and business workflows to unaccountable third-parties, or worse yet willingly training the models of companies' would-be competitors, organizations will be better served through a five-step architecture process to building an AI-driven future for their business products and services as SaaS declines in the months and years to come.

Prepare Data
The most valuable commodity that businesses and individuals have is their data, the underlying information that drives proprietary and private knowledge. Data must be prepared, across the public cloud, private systems, and on premises data lakes and warehouses, and made readable by machines. This preparation process includes a rigorous clean-up and categorization process to ensure the quality of the data is suitable for use.
Train
Once properly filtered, organized, and tagged, the data is then suitable for use in training a type of model, a behavioral framework used by artificial intelligence, to understand the proprietary data's value, significance, and ultimately, human-like meaning. Whether non-generative and encoded, encoded-decoded, decoded-only, novel-identified, or densely associative and expressive architecture, each model framework offers specific benefits to their corresponding enterprise workflows.
Validate
After the intense training process, that tokenizes proprietary data into trillions of relationships, the model is ready for benchmarking to validate the model's quality across a wide range of metrics. These metrics are specific to the intended business application: from customer support, to data analysis, and even executive autonomous functioning and decision-making. Only models that pass the thresholds are suitable for use.
Tune
Adapting the model to downstream paths is the basis for the productivity gains inherent in artificial intelligence. Ensuring that the model can replace and far outperform other experiences (such as a SaaS web-based interface) requires leveraging the model against a specific set of expected results, which will in turn produce a set of ideal prompts to use for the model and its data.
Deploy
Specialized models that have been fine-tuned and validated for experiences are ready as solutions to be deployed for use by end-users. The more specialized and highly-tuned the model against privileged and proprietary data sets, the more impressive and impactful generative and autonomous data systems can scale for applications. Continuous monitoring of both data and the models built upon them remains essence for proper long-term governance to ensure its performance.

Artificial Intelligence is entering its Apotheosis - the moment where divine qualities are ascribed to its potential, but its own anticipated fall from grace can occur if humans mismanage this incredible power. Enterprises have critical choices, much as businesses did at the start of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, and a misstep (or indecisiveness) can lead to irrelevance and insolvency. We can help. Embarking on a transformation around artificial intelligence requires trusted partnership grounded in experience and results to which our clients can attest.

Catastrophe's Conflux

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte once famously advised to "never interrupt an enemy when they are in the process of destroying themselves." The continuing drama surrounding the unmaking of OpenAI reveals that a tragic combination of two competing directions now predictably threatens the future of artificial intelligence.

Global markets and international researchers were stunned over the weekend when OpenAI's Board terminated their popular founder and CEO Sam Altman, resulting in the swift resignation of President and COO Greg Brockman. The ongoing saga has seemingly undergone numerous twists, from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claiming to hire Altman and Brockman to then walking back the hire in a move some speculate was aimed to salvage relationships and stock prices, 700+ OpenAI employees signing a letter threatening to resign (and join Altman at Microsoft) calling for the Board's dissolution over the chaotic termination, and even the Board's desperate search for a new CEO. In continuing twists, the OpenAI board was in such turmoil over the attempted coup that they offered the leadership of the organization (and a total merger) to competitor Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, shopped the top executive spot to former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Alex Wang co-founder of Scale AI (all three rejected), until finally former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear accepted an interim CEO role at the rapidly-deteriorating organization.

Though this drama is far from over, and the fate over who ultimately controls the pace of generative artificial intelligence and progress towards artificial general intelligence is still to be determined (hint: likely Microsoft), very real and long-lasting damage is being done to the innovation economy. Consider, for example, how OpenAI CTO Mira Murati was initially named interim CEO by the board, in the same breath as Altman was fired, but has now been reduced to a footnote in the ongoing saga. Arguably one of the most influential women in tech, Murati was responsible for architecting and engineering ChatGPT and DALL-E, two cornerstone technologies in generative text and images, respectively. While she soon thereafter called for the board's resignation and worked towards Altman's return, co-signing the same demand letter that hundreds of other OpenAI employees delivered, Murati was conspicuously excluded from Altman's future leadership team. While she will undoubtedly remain influential in the artificial intelligence community for years to come, the ordeal has indisputably damaged her reputation as an executive.

So tarnished is now the association with OpenAI while this drama continues to unfold, that mass-resignations are already happening, with or without the OpenAI Board's dismissal. As incalculable damage is being done to the human capital and net worth of OpenAI's philanthropic mission and for-profit enterprises, competitors are making a mad dash for talent. Violating Bonaparte's maxim, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has cravenly promised a salary and equity match for any researcher who jumps ship to join his team, prompting Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to make the same assurances in what Fortune rightly calls a "feeding frenzy." As the value of every endeavor is, indisputably, the people behind it, the putative worth of all of OpenAI, just days ago one of the most valuable and disruptive startups on the planet, is in a catastrophic free-fall. While there may now likely be significant legal exposure to the board, the global economy is quickly configuring for a post-OpenAI world.

This outcome was inevitable. OpenAI is a nonprofit organization that for years attempted to generate traction in the artificial intelligence space, until finally landing Microsoft as a key investor in 2019. To balance its research mission with the necessary innovation imperative, OpenAI constructed a framework of nested institutions that were subordinated to the mission-based parent. This resulted in a clumsy arrangement whereby a nonprofit entity controlled the fate of a for-profit enterprise, without any of the checks or balances necessary to drive accountability or transparency in operational management processes. The now-consequential mismanagement of the board exposes deep systemic problems in poor governance that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has declared that he is "done" being "surprised like this," vowing to "take care of all governance issues."

The efforts of a nonprofit attempting to dismiss a for-profit engine that was, ostensibly, the driving force of its entire mission was, as Bloomberg puts it best, doomed from the start. And while Microsoft was a "minority owner" of the for-profit OpenAI entity at 49% equity, the fruits of research and innovation would have never been possible without the financial engine and commercial runaway success of ChatGPT and its over 100M subscribers and tens of thousands of corporate customers generating billions of dollars in revenue a month. The failures of maintaining and enforcing an effective governance model exposed both the nonprofit and the for-profit entities to existential peril, especially as increasing evidence now points to a likely hostile neutralization effort on the part of conflicted board members spooked by the dizzying speed of development and the likelihood their own competing companies could never match Microsoft's dominance in the space.

While governance reform at OpenAI will likely spell the end of the nonprofit side of the organization, ironically defeating the skeptics and their interim CEO Emmett Shear who tried to slow down if not altogether pause development on artificial intelligence, the future of generative AI and ultimately general artificial intelligence will remain blazingly fast, if not faster, than it was before, if it institutes the right type of corporate controls and board governance models in place. Whether back at OpenAI, transferred to Microsoft or some future organization, OpenAI's team would benefit from the work with which we at Technocery have helped our clients beginning with five key elements required for effective governance:

Strategic Alignment
To properly scale, navigating the complexities of dual competing visions (the nonprofit philanthropic aim of the OpenAI mission, and the for-profit revenue-generating innovation arm of OpenAI's development work) requires disciplined organizational design. Both nonprofit and for-profit arms must be strategically aligned and mutually-reinforcing.
Governance Framework
Sophisticated governance is anchored on clear channels of transparency and accountability through decision-making processes that respect the demands of all key constituencies and stakeholder groups in an organization: its employees, investors, customers, and partners alike.
Leadership Model
Cultivating effective leadership in complex organizations requires elevating individuals who demonstrate disciplined decision-making and sound judgment, while concurrently divesting from people who either lack the potential or behavioral competency to support their organizations.
Crisis Management
Ensuring resilience and continuity in rapidly-developing and highly-disruptive industries necessitates a focus on rapid response, comprehensive planning, and clear and consistent organizational priorities reinforced through performance and management. A combination of tools and resources could be leveraged to halt impulsive and self-destructive decision-making while reinforcing strategic and consequential execution.
Communication
Bridging the divide between diverse stakeholders - from institutional research leaders and nonprofit advocates, to business executives and investment management professionals - requires clarity that drives alignment and builds information. The dizzying opacity and defeaning silence of the OpenAI Board following its self-inflicted actions could have been prevented by ensuring no breakdown occurred to begin with.

The future of artificial intelligence remains more promising than ever, and the skyrocketing surge towards the singularity cannot be stopped. The trainwreck caused by the catastrophic conflux of a nonprofit mission seeking to terminate the success of a for-profit subsidiary will likely be studied in business schools for years to come, as will the largely unnecessary but entirely foreseeable demise of many careers and otherwise-promising futures of the actors that wrought about this chaos. But as a new successor to OpenAI emerges - whether it is OpenAI 2.0, the Microsoft Advanced AI Team headed by Altman and populated by the entire OpenAI employee base, or some other venture likely headed by the charismatic Altman - it is clear that reformed governance, clarity of purpose, and a true commitment to disciplined execution will ensure that this movement does not embark on an act of self-destruction like this ever again.

Risk vs. Reward

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

In the fog of war, uncertainty confounds generals into a condition of caution, depriving them of the boldness needed for victory. As the global economy remains murky, businesses are also tempted into critical hesitancy that deny them success. Yet, the rewards are always correlated to the risks undertaken.

"Risk vs. Reward" is an age-old principle that is rooted in game theory, positing that the magnitude of rewards is directly proportional to the risks undertaken. After all, "nothing ventured, nothing gained" translates into so many facets of business leadership, organizational management, and human-centric decision-making. In the post-pandemic period, however, executives are challenged to accurately survey the battlefield of business. For example, in spite dramatic unheavals in the technology sector through the evaporation of cheap cash and disruptions to the real estate market through high inflation, wage growth and a tight labor market drove consumer spending and skyrocketted the U.S. economy to a GDP growth rate of 4.9% the fastest pace in two years. But the general sentiment and outlook remains poor.

The socioeconomic disruptions to the way people live, work, and play continue to play out in unpredictable ways. This principal uncertainty, combined with a volatile global geopolitical and international trade market, are driving leaders to be cautious and, in many cases, move towards retrenchment. Layoffs are now increasingly common in the innovation and startup spaces and many leaders are exploring the emerging singularity of generative artificial intelligence to replace many administrative jobs through automation. But short-sighted decision-making, much like impulsive and reactive hesitation, are the fast-track to failure.

Understanding Risk versus Reward

In game design, players are often presented with choices that carry varying degrees of risk and potential reward. This dynamic creates engagement as players weigh the potential outcomes of their decisions. In business, challenges need to be weighed against their corresponding opportunities, as leaders are constantly faced with decisions that could propel their company forward or set them back.

Technocery's Offering (Services)
Our Assessments program provides a comprehensive evaluation of business performance, helping executives and functional leaders make informed decisions by understanding potential risks and rewards. We take a methodical, data-driven, predictive and proactive view of business opportunities while forecasting and managing the challenges likely to arise from a decisive pursuit.

The Nature of Risk-Taking

Humans are inherently risk-averse, a trait rooted in our evolutionary desire for survival. However, our risk tolerance can be influenced by factors like past experiences, societal expectations, and individual personality traits. Business is cutthroat and competitive, and an increasingly constrained operating environment has led to a limited time-window to seize the day and achieve significant milestones or potentially face peril altogether. Understanding and harnessing the human psychology and organizational management behind risk-taking can be pivotal to a business' success.

Technocery's Offering (Services)
Our Engagements service, particularly through Partnership Roadmaps, helps organizations understand the intrinsic risk appetite of its people and align processes with their strategic objectives so that opportunities can be properly contextualized and challenges structurally overcome.

Risk as a Catalyst for Innovation

While risk often carries the connotation of potential loss, it is also the driving force behind innovation. The rapid successes and tremendous advances of civilization can be traced to geographies where resource-constraints were coupled with hyper-competition and socioeconomic crowding. Companies that are willing to take calculated risks can disrupt their markets, outpace their competitors, and redefine industries.

Technocery's Offering (Practices)
The Digital practice at Technocery empowers businesses to leverage emerging technologies, fostering a culture of innovation and calculated risk-taking. Our deep understanding of disruptive innovation in the age of radical connectivity empower our clients to place trends, such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and blockchain, within the proper value continuum.

Managing Organizations for Risk Mitigation

While risk-taking is essential, it is equally crucial to have mechanisms in place to mitigate potential negative outcomes. Effective organizational management involves balancing bold decisions with the strategies to manage and minimize their potential downsides. Instinctive and impulsive decision-making, born often of poorly-managed business cultures, can be better harnessed through stewardship, accountability, and performance.

Technocery's Offering (Services)
Our Operations services ensure that as organizations pivot and take risks, they have robust operational prorcesses in place to manage and mitigate potential challenges likely to arise. Building key performance indicators that are predictive of business outcomes will ensure risk-taking remains prescriptive to the challenges confronted and opportunities pursued.

Empowering Teams to Take Risks

At the heart of every organization are its people. Creating a culture where employees feel empowered to take risks - knowing they have the support and backing of their leadership - can lead to groundbreaking ideas and solutions. Ensuring that team members are supported to become everyday leaders helps build behavioral competencies that foster growth and drive high performance through ownership.

Technocery's Offering (Services)
Through our Transformations service, we help organizations create centers of excellence, fostering a culture where risk-taking is encouraged and celebrated. We help separate the knowledge, skills, and abilities that people bring through experience from the behavioral competencies learned throughout a person's lifetime to unlock the full potential of every team member's performance.

The Paradox of Choice in Risk-Taking

While risk-taking is essential, it is also crucial to ensure that choices are not made in a vacuum. The paradox of choice suggests that when presented with too many options, individuals may become paralyzed, leading to inaction. This "Analysis Paralysis," as it is often called in business, can translate to missed opportunities through a loss of velocity and, worse, catastrophic decisions that are too meek through misunderstanding.

Technocery's Offering (Practices)
Our Ventures practice assists businesses in identifying and focusing on the most promising opportunities, ensuring they can make decisive, informed choices. By moving initiatives through a value pipeline, we help organizations drive actions anchored by timeliness and relevance, while eliminating all distractions to the venture process.

The Long Game of Sustainable Risk-Taking

While short-term risks can lead to immediate rewards, sustainable risk-taking involves looking at the bigger picture. It's about making decisions that not only benefit the organization in the present but also set it up for long-term success. Additionally, short-term thinking can also undermine scale as staged-growth is often dependent upon calculated foundation-building.

Technocery's Offering (Practices)
With our deep expertise in sectors ranging from Startup to Enterprise, Government to Defense, Technocery provides insights and strategies that prioritize sustainable growth for long-term vision. Choosing boldly means selecting the right partner who has navigated the waters of the seas you seek to traverse.

The dance between risk and reward is a nuanced one, requiring a delicate balance of boldness and caution. By understanding the principles of risk vs. reward and integrating them into business leadership and organizational management, companies can position themselves for unparalleled success. At Technocery, we have built our reputation upon our clients. We stand ready to guide businesses through this intricate journey, ensuring that every risk taken is a step towards a brighter, more rewarding future.

Deconstructing Labor Disruptions

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

As the volatile global business landscape evolves through the post-pandemic period, labor disruptions (strikes, layoffs, and resignations) will be a recurring challenge. Rather than being destabilized by these developments, five deconstructions of your strategy can help you become even more effective.

While labor disruptions pose significant challenges, they also offer unique opporutnities for innovation and transformation. Companies should reassess, recalibrate, and reinvent their organizational strategies. There are five actionable insights that managers can use to navigate labor's labyrinth effectively.

1. Rapid Response Assessment

Before deploying any countermeasures, conduct a rapid response assessment to understand the scope, scale, and potential impact of the labor disruption. Identify the underlying factors driving this disruption - be it compensation and benefits, workplace culture, remote work vs. return-to-office, or even simply the competitive landscape in your industry, sector, or segment. Use a SWOT analysis to identify internal and external factors that could affect your organization's performance.

How Technocery Helps (Services)
Our Assessment Program offers a 360-degree evaluation, providing you with a detailed recommendation complete with a preliminary action plan and frameworks designed for your specific business configuration and environment.

2. Communication Plan

Develop a comprehensive communication plan that addresses all stakeholders - employees, suppliers, customers, and investors. Transparency is key. Regularly update stakeholders on the situation and the steps being taken to mitigate risks. Labor Disruptions, once an anomaly, have become a recurring reality and maintaining a crisis communications cadence will remain essential.

How Technocery Helps (Practices)
Leveraging our industry practices, we can help you craft and execute a relevant, timely, and valuable stakeholder communication strategy that is both effective and sector-specific. Multidimensional engagement (for example, through our Government and Nonprofit practices) may be necessary to enlist your client community, policymakers, and board members for action.

3. Adapt Operations

Scrutinize your current operational processes to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies that could be exacerbated by labor disruptions. Consider implementing lean methodologies to streamline operations. Design and deploy alternative staffing and personnel strategies to survive the storm. Devise a negotiating strategy that disrupts the disruption and re-engages your workforce for productivity.

How Technocery Helps (Services)
Our Operations Services are designed to be fully embedded within your organization, providing tailored solutions that align with your unique challenges and specific opportunities.

4. Digital Transformation

If the labor disruption is likely to have long-term implications, as we have seen in a number of industries and sectors throughout the second and third quarters this year, consider accelerating your digital transformation initiatives. This could range from implementing advanced analytics to predict and prescribe action, to automating routine tasks and procedures. Using Digital Transformation as a long-term strategy is an inevitable and invaluable benefit for all organizations.

How Technocery Helps (Practices)
Our Digital and Synthetics Practices specialize in deploying scalable technology stacks to ensure your organization is future-ready. Equip your organization with the intelligence and insights needed to scale without the corresponding investment in headcount.

5. Diversification

Use this disruption as an opportunity to explore adjacent markets or diversify your product portfolio. Conduct market research to identify the gaps in the market that align with your core competencies. Evolve your go to market strategy to center new work on the critical needs of customers and constituents in ways that transcend the current labor and workforce issues.

How Technocery Helps (Services)
Our Venture services focus on market disruption through radical innovation, helping you identify and actualize new business opportunities. Synergize your organization's vision to scale to new heights never before conceived.

Construct the Conquest

Labor disruptions, while challenging, should serve as a catalyst for organizational change and innovation. By constructing a rapid assessment, establishing a multi-stakeholder communication plan, reevaluating operational processes, considering digital transformation, and exploring new ventures, you can not only navigate the current disruption but also position your organization for future growth. Architecting your destiny requires constructing the bridge to an unforeseeable future, and we can help you map the way.

Confronting Catastrophe

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The New Year usually heralds beginnings, a fresh start, a new look. Yet as the world plunges into economic uncertainty, more businesses are realizing they've reached the end of the runway. Will you take off and soar? Or pull back and crash?

Much as analysts spent decades unraveling the socioeconomic impacts of the Spanish Flu of 1918, our economic, social, and political landscapes have been redesigned in response to the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic and we are still learning how. As 2020 unfolded, companies over-hired to meet an anticipated (and ultimately reversed) trend of long-term digital consumer and corporate behavior. Though the productivity and lifestyle benefits of remote work cannot be overstated, by 2021, people had resumed pre-pandemic consumer and cultural habits in many ways. Many tech layoffs over the past eighteen months are attributed to cost-cutting in ways to reverse the pandemic-era hiring spree, but much of this behavior is no longer being driven by business fundamentals but instead by social contagion. And when businesses just copy one another impulsively, mirroring the activity of other companies for fear of missing out on a momentary trend, social scientists worry that we are becoming the architects of our own reactive undoing rather than the entrepreneurs of our unfulfilled destinies.

Yet amidst challenges there are opportunities. As they evolve, organizations tend to operate reactively by responding to the needs of the marketplace and often times will overlook the benefits of an intentionally proactive engagement posture. Scale is predictable. Even companies that are mature and established are engaging in ruthless efficiency-based calculations - like Microsoft's layoff of 10,000 employees, Amazon's slashing of 18,000 jobs, or Google reducing 12,000 members of its workforce, all this week alone - rather than courageously seizing the moment to amplify growth through predictive analytics. Realigning a business from a legacy model of viewing every investment as a cost-center towards a mature model of engagements and people as inherently revenue-driving requires a shift from efficiency-based thinking to success-oriented operations.

Fig. Legacy and Mature Models

There are a few short-term initiatives (and more longer-term ones) that can help set up an organization for this necessary experiential evolution by centering business operations on the customers that we all serve. Prioritizing the right ones, as well as aligning them to the right measures, are at the heart of our practices. Here are five initiatives you might want to launch, based on typical questions we might ask at this pivotal moment.

Customer Journey (Retention)
Are your teams and departments integrated and working together to drive client outcomes? Does every stakeholder align with a clear RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) framework? Do you know what operating frameworks and procedures are best applied given the need or circumstance? A Customer Journey is an evergreen process that outlines all stages of a client's relationship with your organization, from acquisition and onboarding, through adoption and growth, and ensures that all teams and individuals work seamlessly and collaboratively.
Customer Segmentation (Revenue)
Do you think of all your clients and constituents the same way? How do you know when to spend valuable personal time with a customer vs. relying upon automated messaging? Where is your company's hiring plan against your expected revenue? Are you on track to protect and grow your company's bottom line? Customer Segmentation is the foundational exercise of organizing revenue by account against lifetime value, industry vertical, and even psychographic framing, ensuring you know exactly who you're serving and the best people and processes to plan for your clients' success.
Theory of Change (Go to Market)
What is your organization's mission? Why does your company exist? How will you change the world? What is your unique and differentiated value - the thing that you, and only you, can do that no one else can offer? Does everyone in your team or business articulate this vision in the same way? What is your 30-second elevator pitch? Theory of Change is a vision-setting craft that aligns people with your purpose so that your processes reflect a plan that will achieve your outcomes.
Practice the Mission (Sales & Marketing)
How do you attract and retain your customers or constituents? What measures do you set and track for your sales reps and account managers? Do you know your return on your investment for your pursuit of the marketplace? Practice the Mission is a review of your customer acquisition programs and processes, ensuring that your command of the message resonates through generous listening by identifying the core problems that clients seek to solve and then setting the qualifying criteria against which your sales and marketing teams can operate to succeed with prospects.
Deliver the Plan (Service)
Why do customers stay with you? How do you delight your clients and constituents through your experience? What plans or playbooks do you employ to ensure that every moment - from onboarding through adoption and renewal or growth - drives additional value? Deliver the Plan is a comprehensive assessment of the client experience of your service, support, and success organizations, ensuring your client-facing teams have widely-understood charters and measures and are constantly empowering the rest of your company to be their best.

Seven other playbooks and projects you may want to consider include:

Digital Touch - Automated engagement for client lifecycle acceleration
Onboarding - Post-sale customer enablement and education for adoption
Business Reviews - Client-facing partnership roadmap alignment sessions
Incident Management - Service processes for continuous improvement
Health Checks - Re-engaging customers through pre-emptive value
Change Management - Operational excellence to drive exceptional outcomes
Confronting Issues - Building partnership through working agreements

If you're ready to evolve your experience and exploit your competition's reactive moves during the coming challenges, consider how we can help!

30-60-90

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The first ninety days of an engagement sets the tone for how the rest of that relationship develops. If first impressions are everything, then early mistakes can easily become unrecoverable.

It is generally accepted that over 70% of churn occurs because of the customer's first 90 days but the magnitude of the problem is rarely appreciated. Customer Onboarding, much like a person's Probationary Period in a new job, is a race against time to demonstrate success. If this "time to value" doesn't yield recognized results, it converts the client into a passive agent or, potentially, even a detractor for your brand. It also creates a scenario from which sales and services teams rarely recover: they will always be chasing the renewal, generating opportunities against the account, and ultimately, making the customer rightly feel "transacted against."

Conversely, time and energy spent on a thoughtful and valuable onboarding process is the fastest path to more revenue for a company. A "5% increase in customer retention produces more than 25% increase in profit," reveals a Harvard Business Review study from decades ago, and we now know that customer onboarding can reduce churn by over two-thirds, more than any other effort later in the client journey! So it remains perplexing why the onboarding process is so often trivialized into little more than training exercises by most product companies and services providers.

Effective and impactful customer onboarding does not focus on meaningless utilization metrics (such as logins or interactions), nor should a valuable client implementation rely upon completion of largely arbitrary project management milestones (such as configurations, customizations, and quality assurance through the deployment process). At Technocery, we focus on business outcomes for customers and for onboarding, this comes down to a measured and methodical approach to ensuring customers receive timely, relevant, and valuable business results from their relationship over the first ninety days.

First 30: Discovery
Customers are generally aware of your value proposition since, after all, your organization successfully sold them upon the promise of its potential. But even mature scaled companies with sales processes that embed solutions and success professionals as a part of the opportunity pursuit often misunderstand the customer's operational business drivers, because purchasing stakeholders and end-customers have different measures of success. Engaging in generous listening to learn about your new stakeholders' business needs, their challenges they are looking to overcome and the opportunities to succeed, will create an early vision of how to align on key performance indicators. The Onboarding must be calibrated to the conditions and circumstances of your clients. Do not make them feel like they are going through a one-size-fits-all "cookie-cutter" approach; ensure that your processes are built upon best practices but malleable. Exercises to undertake in the first 30 days include:
- Intake Questionnaires, to understand client stakeholder roles and responsibilities, other competing initiatives, and customer-specific timelines.
- Strategic Planning, or "kick off" meeting, to walk through and jointly-define an onboarding process that centralizes the client's business drivers.
- User Workshops, to better understand end-user needs and identify risks or issues that will need to be mitigated and addressed through onboarding.

Upon the conclusion of the Discovery phase, your company and your client should have a firm understanding of value drivers answering questions such as: how is work successfully executed, why has the client engaged your organization, and what is the measurable business result reflective of a successful partnership and, specifically, a well-run onboarding. Document this collaboratively in a Strategy Brief.

Second 30: Design
Understand the impact of value drivers and map against the client priorities. Demonstrate that you have listened to the client's needs by outlining the steps for a successful onboarding, showcasing the major challenges raised by the client that need to be addressed. Focus extensively on a process that both incorporates client review and formalizes customer sign-off; both feedback and approval are essential for maintaining buy-in and accelerating forward motion. In particular, pay close attention to how people need to be set up for success, any programs or systems that both your team and the client team will use to remain tightly coordinated and synchronized, and any process considerations necessary to address gaps in knowledge, skills, or capabilities that might otherwise threaten the success of the onboarding.

Unique considerations for the client onboarding, such as customizations to your approach or configurations of your product, must be documented and approved by your client to ensure that they are in control of the process while benefiting from your company's maturity and experience in the delivery of your valuable and differentiated offerings. Outline this Action Plan, the steps, timelines, milestones, and dependencies in a Project Brief.

Third 30: Deployment
Execute upon the action plan by demonstrating agility in your bias for action while also exhibiting a high degree of customer-centricity in how you manage your client relationship and solve unexpected problems. Keep your deployment metrically driven by using the key performance indicators that the client identified in discovery and you incorporated in your design phase. Focus on measurable business results that are being tracked to throughout your deployment process by addressing end-user needs, which are often grounded in a classic triumvirate of awareness, adoption, and action.
- Awareness is achieved by maximizing educational information about your product and service being onboarded, making it relatable and accessible.
- Adoption is not just about use through training, but actually making a person's time at work and life easier through your partnership.
- Action is represented through the conversion of the end-user into an evangelist for what your partnership can do for others in the client organization.

Ensuring that the deployment is conducted in an agile approach remains critical: team members should be receiving daily support on overcoming blockers, the client should be receiving regular updates on the onboarding's progress, and the key measures of success should remain at the heart of your effort's goals. Deployments often have unforeseen challenges, and addressing these with accountability and transparency will directly influence the customer's perception of you as their embedded partner, not just some transactional vendor.

Debriefing from an onboarding should be an opportunity to both celebrate and recognize this critical customer journey milestone and aligning on a go-forward plan. There will be future initiatives, improvements for subsequent onboardings or phases, and action items for the relationship. Forward momentum anchored on the client's business needs help maintain the relationship as a true partnership, and prepare the client for monthly health checks and quarterly businesses reviews that keep business outcomes centered on your work together and will ensure both you and your customer evolve together.

Why do Customers Churn?
There are three fundamental causes of customer cancellation or discontinuation of the business relationship, and all three of them have their origins in the first ninety days of a relationship that the above principles are designed to thwart through onboarding.

Improper Solution. Products and services must have a timely application to a relevant underlying business problem that the customer needs addressed.
Inconsistent Adoption. End-users must be integrated into the onboarding process to ensure they are well-educated and well-supported for their daily routine.
Incomplete Value. Relationships must be grounded in clear alignment to well-defined measurable business results that are revisited and reviewed regularly.

AI and the Singularity

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Creativity is often cited as one of the central hallmarks of sentience. The ability to reach into the unknown and imagine or invent through the spark of inspiration has been a uniquely human quality. Now that artificial intelligence is creating art, what comes next?

The Singularity has been described as the hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes irreversible and has unforeseeable changes in human civilization. With the arrival of advanced artificial intelligence, or AI, built upon machine learning that leverages vast universes of human knowledge and big data, this is no longer a hypothetical and it is now our new reality. Today, artificial intelligences are creating stunning works of art, composing moving pieces of music, and engaging in social conversational relationship-building and the sort of inspirational deep thinking that surpasses the productivity and capability of individual humans. The implications to our species are unfolding in real-time and having a profound impact on the planet.

Once the mainstay of science fiction writers and inventive movie producers, AI is now in the hands of the public and the largest data sets in the world have enabled ordinary people to use computers to create stunning masterpieces that rival those of famed artists. Last week, CNN reported on Stable Diffusion, a popular open-source AI tool that uses prompts to create images, and how it created art influenced in part by Erin Hanson, an award-winning artist known for creating vibrant colors and chunky brushstrokes in her vivid oil paintings. "Oh, wow," she remarked on some of the art created, concluding, "I would put that on my wall." Other artists have responded angrily, such as Daniel Danger, who remarked in the same report: "I don't want to participate at all in the machine that's going to cheapen what I do."

It's already too late. The entirety of human creative knowledge - from every phrase of text, to every work of art, and soon, every piece of music - is being consumed, studied, indexed, and mastered by advanced artificial intelligences. It may feel like magic, but the machines are simply ingesting mountains of data - billions upon billions of images scraped off of the internet, paired with written descriptions - and being trained on its significance. Machine Learning is accelerating the rate at which programs are leveraging these sets of data to improve their own understanding by making predictions and decisions without any human intervention. And because intellectual property law throughout the world, and especially in the United States, never anticipated using copyright-protected work to train computers, there is a vast legal chasm that has been (once again) opened by the blazing speed of technological innovation. When, as Business Insider reported last month, a first-time entrant created an AI-generated piece of artwork that won first place at the Colorado State Fair, the world began to witness how easily the voice that ordinary humans have can achieve extraordinary results with the vast and limitless computational power of artificial intelligence.

As of this article's writing, there are numerous academic, proprietary, and open-source artificial intelligence platforms for creating images, composing music, and writing text, all of which are widely accessible. Whereas a single human creator might intentionally invoke the influences of a handful of predecessors in their creations, artificial intelligences can leverage every single creation ever manifested and make higher level decisions about what prior art to use and, with just some minimal feedback (a word or two from their human end-users), design a masterpiece that could compete with, and triumph over, slavish and pain-staking wrought works of art. Even videos built upon generative-AI will soon usher in an era where widespread feature film productions, complete with artificially-generated actors, scripts, sets, direction, and production design, will create a truly endless volume of consumption for humanity.

As these advanced artificial intelligences stun the world with their understanding of human expression, made possible by text-based autoregressive language modeling like generative pre-trained transformers, the rate of evolution is approaching exponential growth. Over the past week alone, scientists have developed artificial intelligences capable of reading human thoughts, controlling the feedback it chooses to accept or reject, and even predict its own future. These expectation-shattering developments raise the question of the singularity's approach and whether the technological triumph of artificial intelligence is leading to humanity's extinction. Considering these developments have begun to unfold within the month of October alone, genuine questions about the emerging consciousness of computers and whether synthetic life as we know it might emerge soon, is no longer the stuff of make-believe.

Artificial Intelligence, for now, still relies upon the progenitors - the humans - to inform what it knows, influence what it can create, and drive a new category of art that, while certainly original, is nevertheless still the product of the humans who use these intelligences. But as the very essence of what makes life function is modeled, replicated, and mastered by technology, we will soon approach a point where humans are no longer necessary, or perhaps even desirable, for these amazing technological creations to finally step into our world and take their place among the sentient and singularly magnificent life forms of our universe.

Seven Stages of Scale

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Many companies undergoing frantic hiring freezes or excruciating layoffs during this economic downturn could have avoided this.

Businesses can often weather storms amidst uncertainties if they stage their growth to scale. "Scale," however, is often misunderstood and, especially among startup founders, misrepresented. One cannot "scale" an organization from 5 to 500 employees; this is linear (or exponential) growth without any sense of the corresponding revenue. (We aren't even talking about profitability yet, just a fundamental analysis of a company's basic performance.) Yet, you will often hear meaningless vanity metrics like these spouted as evidence of success. They aren't. They are evidence of expenditure, and for many companies, spending is happening reactively and the current financial climate is calling out these organizations and holding them to account.

Scale is about correlating business fundamentals to consequential growth strategically. Across all industries, for businesses, foundations, and institutions, it happens predictably and requires certain dependencies to be met before it can occur incrementally. Without these critical stages, even wildly successful publicly traded companies become vulnerable to uncontrollable market forces.

People
Begin with the very reason your organization exists: your people. Often called the "Vision Statement," or the "Theory of Change," it is fundamental to articulate in as few words as possible the why of your business. It should be aspirational but also timely and relevant. Your core values and company culture are anchored upon your people and how they see themselves as a part of your vision.
Plan
Companies enter the market with the promise of their potential; they compete in the marketplace with a unique and differentiated offering. You should offer something that none of your competitors delivers, and you should have exclusive command over both how you communicate this offering and how customers can only actualize value from what you offer from you and only you. Your Go to Market is about your plan and how you offer it.
Process
Aligning people with a vision and arming them with a strong go to market strategy provides a business with an engine of innovation (why you exist) and a mission to fulfill (how you thrive). You only need the fuel to jump-start engagement, and for this reason, a framework is necessary. Don't over-engineer processes, as they will change often and adapt to the many lessons that are learned at all stages of maturity. But setting rules of engagement for how people work together will ensure your plan can succeed.

The first three stages of scale are foundational. They lay the groundwork for your organization through its people, the programs they design, and the processes that place clients at the heart of the work they do together. These fundamentals are often revisited and updated, but skipped or abbreviated at tremendous peril. Without grounding in your company's purpose, or supporting your people with a coherent go to market, a business journey runs the risk of easily being derailed. It will also face deep challenges to evolve to true relevance and value.

Explore
Once you have established a culture of continuous improvement and client-centered collaboration as your base, it is time to head out into the market and test your message and offerings with prospective clients, current customers, and potential partners. Generous listening, both to the problems you are not currently solving as well as to the direction of the industry in which you are playing, will provide you with early indicators of how you should change your plan and tweak your foundations before you strike your first expansion.
Expand
Accepting revenue is sometimes an existential necessity; you can't always choose your clients. But you should choose what type of customers you pursue, and the choices you make will also create feedback opportunities for helping existing clients be more successful in ways you never envisioned. These will create adjacencies - services and solutions you never originally envisioned offering, but that are complementary to your core and an extension of your vision. In this exercise, you will identify new partners and competitors participating in your client ecosystem, and must maintain a differentiated and unique value proposition to succeed.
Exploit
Evolving from a vendor into a partner in client services requires a dramatic pivot, one that demonstrates you are rigorously overcoming your challenges and relentlessly pursuing your opportunities. By becoming your clients' trusted advisor, you will prove yourself as indispensible to their business as their own team members. Operations and Sales are two fundamental disciplines that have to be redesigned at this stage to be proactive, predictive, and success-measured in order to transform into a new kind of company: an unconquerable force.
Exterminate
Dominating your organization's segment is less about vanquishing your competitors and more about revelaing yourself to be peerless and incomparable. Your work with clients is reflected in all that you do internally at your organization; you anticipate their needs and the industry's unknowable challenges, you articulate value in a way that is convening of your space as a community anchored on your work, and you truly own your space and define the rules of engagement moving forward.

The 4X'es of Scale represent stages of a maturity model reliant upon a perpetual motion of improvement in your foundational phases. Over 90% of startups fail within a year and money is only 2 of the top 20 reasons why. Failure comes down to not having scaled the enterprise with a sense of consequential meaning, and more than half of the reasons companies of all sizes collapse is because they did not properly set their people up for success. For us at Technocery, this is about foundational stages: people need a plan and process that connects them deeply with their customers, so that they can listen carefully and address core business needs in consolidated, actionable ways. We can help.

Recalibrate in Recession

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

As the world heads towards recession, there are three things you can do right now to ensure your organization thrives.

News today that a prestigious research firm forecasted a 98% chance of a global recession joins a growing chorus of analysts, from the World Trade Organization to the International Monetary Fund and even the World Bank, reporting on dramatic economic slowdown and shrinkage in the third quarter. (Some, like The Market Sniper's Francis Hunt, expect a global depression.) While it is too early to know the depth and breadth of the downturn, its impacts have been felt across the technology, finance, real estate, and retail sectors, principally because so many of these industries have been reliant upon cheap and easy financing which has now largely evaporated. Layoff Charts show that reductions in force and company bankruptcies are approaching (and exceeding, in the aggregate) highs seen during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and are accelerating.

Amidst the doom and gloom, it's easy to miss the real opportunity for organizations to re-engineer their operations, optimize their go-to-market, and re-design their programs and processes. With a bear market now dominant, technology companies will have to protect revenues with customers in order to "extend the cash runway" (a phrase repeatedly being used in disclosures on cost-cutting measures) and persist beyond their typical one or two bad quarters away from insolvency. This isn't the first time that startups will have to re-think their game plan to survive major challenges, but corporations of all sizes will need to re-visit their operating plans and departmental playbooks in order to seize the opportunity and thrive amidst adversity.

Economic downturns present an essential opportunity to review and rebuild companies around practices that drive performance. Financial planning must be disciplined and anchored to business outcomes. Products and services need to be aligned to unique and differentiated value reflecting client demand in the marketplace. Corporate cultures, which have not settled since the Great Resignation began, should be grounded in transparency, accountability, and authenticity.

Technocery can help, and here are three ways our services can:

Observe
You can't stop to engage in costly planning, especially as you close the calendar year, but you can audit the people, programs, and processes to know what is working and what isn't. Our Assessment Program is delivered over 30, 60, and 90-day cycles to arm leadership teams, boards, functional organizations, and their departments with the insights they need to be successful. We have helped many organizations over the past twenty years with fresh, outside perspectives, grounded in practical experience, and provided them with critical tools to move forward immediately. These might include new ways of thinking about who you hire, how you can better attract and retain your talent, or where you can connect your objectives to key results. Or they may offer a re-think on your go-to-market or a revamped client experience to maximize retaining and expanding customer revenues.
Operate
Companies are eager to reduce overhead and are looking to payroll as the most immediate (and sometimes, inevitable) source of cost reduction. Rather than simply eliminating key executive or administrative functions (or just 'consolidating' these onto another overworked role), consider leveraging our Operations offering, and we can join as a fractional or full-time part of your team, at any level, from supportive and mentoring of your stakeholders to executive or functional owners. We will augment your capabilities, not through silver-bullets to challenges or one-size-fits-all approaches to opportunities, but by listening generously and promoting innovation to solve problems collaboratively. We have steered dozens of companies through the rough and turbulent waters of unknown economic conditions towards successful outcomes, and know how to combat the dangerous pitfalls of reactive thinking by instead proactively moving towards predictable, scalable business results.
Optimize
Sometimes, it's clear what needs to change but very few organizations have the experience or track record to know exactly how to change it. Our Transformation services were born out of our extensive expertise creating centers of excellence grounded in key performance indicators and supporting teams to function with customer centricity in mind. By separating what you do (your assets and capabilities) from your audience and stakeholder demands (your value proposition), we can help your organization and its stakeholders reimagine the business from the lens of the unfulfilled promises of your story through the untapped potential of your people. Typical deliverables can range from new customer journeys or constituent engagement models, to new playbooks for your sales and success teams that are timely, relevant, and valuable.

The Recession may be coming but it's not here yet and before it does arrive in early 2023 you can prepare to weather the storm. Ensuring that your entire organization is focused on buyer needs, value drivers, and desired outcomes can, when coupled with prudent processes and practical support for your people, lead to a successful calibration of the traits that will make your business successful as the markets are reconstructed. The time to act is now.