It’s been a very tough quarter for economic forecasters, quota-carrying sales teams and CEOs. The sudden downturn even caught GE’s legendary planners by surprise. If you’re an executive at a technology company, you may already have started an FY09 planning process to re-examine staffing, product investments and revenue. These already bake in your core business assumptions, though, so you should “stress test” your assumptions using scenario planning. Continue reading
How Well Can You Predict The Future?
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2005 was a great year for open source developers and solutions, with a dramatic boost in credibility, tools and respect. As part of this, there are an increasing number of companies commercializing open source: adding value through installers, packaging, coordinated releases, technical support, management utilities and formal product planning.
When you’re launching a new venture, one of your hungry competitor earliest considerations is how your innovation might fit into the existing technical environment: should it replace some dominant species or improve the overall market climate? In ecological terms, is your new company going to produce fish food or fight the largest carnivores for survival? And how should that decision shape the company you create?