Choking on Your Own Success

Success unleashes its own critical leadership challenges. Unless you deal with them, failure can follow. Here is how you can tame three such beasts.

By Brian Turchin, Cape Horn Strategies

Business success can be fleeting. One day, its champagne and caviar and the next its a Big Mac.

Why is that? Because success, by its very own nature, creates unforeseen and counter-intuitive leadership challenges.

It's like success pushes you through the proverbial looking-glass into a new world, where you discover, much to your surprise, that what worked before, no longer works now.

Here are three such leadership problems:

Leadership That May No Longer Lead
Executives Who May No Longer Execute
Resellers Who May No Longer Resell

Overcoming each requires a new way of thinking.

New Videos from Software 2006!

Every week, new content from the Software 2006 conference appears at www.software2006.com. Online this week: C.K. Prahalad’s keynote address and videos of other key speakers, slides from popular presenters and the Software 2006 Industry report from McKinsey & Co. and Sand Hill Group. Visit each week for more new conference content.

The Power of Red Hat?

Purists might get upset by the fact over Red Hat's ambitions to lock up the so-called open source platform market, grafting JBoss onto the LAMP stack, but Tony Baer of onStrategies says there are corrective mechanisms in the open source playbook that will keep Red Hat from becoming the next Microsoft. Read more in this week’s post to the SandHill.com Blog on open source.

Sales & the CEO

Why does the role of your chief executive seem to have evolved into head of the sales department? Software CEOs need to set forth strategies that reign in this process according to Jeff Thull in this week’s post to the SandHill.com Blog on Sales & Marketing Best Practices.

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The SandHill.com Blog wants your opinions. Send your thoughts on the enterprise software industry to editor@sandhill.com and we’ll publish them in our blog.

Get the News of the Week

Don’t miss SandHill.com’s weekly news summary. Every Friday, editors compile the most important software news of the week and deliver readers a quick capsule of the week’s developments. Read this week’s news summary – Search Wars: Google and Oracle announce new search offerings, plus big SAP earnings and rumors about Oracle buying Novell?

Don’t Miss McKinsey on Next-Gen
In-House Development

As the economics of software development continue to rapidly evolve, enterprises continue to weight their build-vs.-buy options. The McKinsey Quarterly takes a look at how leading edge companies are streamlining their in-house development.

SIIA Software Strategy Summit

Geoffrey Moore, Ann Winblad, Tien Tzuo, Stephen O'Leary and Russ Daniels headline the Software & Information Industry Association’s Software Strategy Summit, where you’ll learn how to leverage changes in the industry brought on by SaaS, Open Source, Offshoring, and Security. Save $200 today when you register for this important event to be held May 15-16, 2006 in San Francisco.

Poll: Impact of China’s Presidential Visit?

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Last week, SandHill.com readers gave their opinions as to whether the pace of M&A is picking up again. Give us your opinion and see the results.
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