Enterprise Mindset Quotes

Every great athlete, artist and aspiring being has a great team to help them flourish and succeed - personally and professionally. Even the so-called 'solo star' has a strong supporting cast helping them shine, thrive and take flight.

leadership. The CEOs made inquiries and questioned the status quo. Accepting failure and charting a path to correct it is the telltale sign of a true leader at the helm of a prosperous enterprise.

Unfortunately, in the homeland security enterprise, practitioners are in the precarious position of being expected to know, or of having to have “done the planning,” for if they do not know or have not planned, how can U.S. citizens (and responders themselves) have confidence that they are secure? The trick is to move into a mindset of continual learning because as Moynihan states “Learning helps to manage uncertainty”113

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

Yet the hardest part of these decisions was neither the technological nor economic transformations required. It was changing the culture—the mindset and instincts of hundreds of thousands of people who had grown up in an undeniably successful company, but one that had for decades been immune to normal competitive and economic forces. The challenge was making that workforce live, compete, and win in the real world. It was like taking a lion raised for all of its life in captivity and suddenly teaching it to survive in the jungle.

My biggest regret is that our first customer was $1M ACV. Ever since that first customer, our product, go-to-market, our support model have all been pulled in one direction — high-end enterprise. Our first $1M ACV customer forced us to get on the elephant hunting treadmill, and we’ve never been able to get off it. Our board, our employees, everyone expects us to only go after customers that were as large or larger than our first customer. And I’ve been watching this new competitor emerge that’s going after the same market as we are, except from the low end. They are tiny but growing rapidly. And it’s too hard for us to compete with them — we don’t have the people, technology stack, support model or frankly, the mindset.

Interview for culture fit. This seems basic, but it’s usually poorly done. Train hiring managers to interview for not just technical or domain skills but also mindset and culture fit.

Each new automation and integration tool promises to reduce fragmentation and transform the enterprise, yet the patchwork approach has now become a new layer of fragmentation. Rather than breaking down silos, we are creating new ones.

Too many tools create point projects. These become islands of automation, disconnected from each other. Instead of creating a more connected enterprise, it has led to new silos. As a new generation of generative AI approaches are added to the stack, new silos may crop up.

executives scan these seven situations for opportunities: • an unexpected success or failure in their own enterprise, in a competing enterprise, or in the industry; • a gap between what is and what could be in a market, process, product, or service (for example, in the nineteenth century, the paper industry concentrated on the 10 percent of each tree that became wood pulp and totally neglected the possibilities in the remaining 90 percent, which became waste); • innovation in a process, product, or service, whether inside or outside the enterprise or its industry; • changes in industry structure and market structure; • demographics; • changes in mind-set, values, perception, mood, or meaning; and • new knowledge or a new technology.

People with a fixed mindset fear failure as they believe it makes their innate limitations visible to others, whereas those with a growth mindset are less risk averse by seeing failure as an opportunity to learn and develop new skills.

The very strongest linkage develops when a leader with a collaborative mind-set spontaneously recognizes the connections between his or her group and the rest of the organization and acts to bring people together to tighten these bonds. In many ways the organization’s cultural values determine how much linking happens naturally and informally. An enterprise with a network of leaders who habitually reach out to each other to coordinate and collaborate may not need many formal linking mechanisms.

We must transform our institutions so that the entire enterprise operates from a growth mind-set (Dweck, 2006), where mistakes and missteps are seen as excellent opportunities to develop our individual and collective brain