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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! What does "A.B.D." stand for? I might have missed it from the prez.
I'm going to guess Always Be Delivering -- it's indeed in the slides!
Finally somebody understands their ABD's
Understand your organisation's DNA
You need to understand the way your organisation thinks. Do they sell products or services? Are the products physical or digital. Are the services digital or people based. When you understand the world view of the exec you can then understand how to talk to them and persuade them.
A case in point. I was originally recruited into a large infrastructure management organization (bridges, roads, airports - that sort of thing) to answer a client question: Do we need more remote monitoring of our infrastructure. The answer turned out to be "no, you just need to understand and make better use of the data you are already collecting". All well and good, and we built (and now sell to major clients" a remote monitoring, data integration and ML platform. The problem was selling it internally. The organisation (in those days, and to a lesser extent still now) had a DNA of a service organisation, selling people (some of them highly skilled) at day rates. Do they didn't understand the idea of selling a software based service. Initially we could only give the software away and sell support contracts - because that was selling people at a day rate, which they understood. And their understanding went to: how do we write contracts for selling people, what are the risks and potential liabilities of selling people, and how do we mitigate those risks.for a software solution they didn't understand what questions to ask, so they couldn't understand the risks.
It's taken a long time to change things, and while the organisation still mainly sells people at a day rate, software solutions are understood, and we can sell them.
I'm now working on building IoT sensor systems within the same organisation. But my better understanding of the organisation's DNA makes it much easier and more effective. For example, it is cheaper to spend more money on working with a partner than spending less on doing it internally - because our organisation understands systems integration (we now sell it as a service) so building sensors with a partner and saying "we do the systems integration" is easily understood. If we tried to do it internally we would spend huge amounts of time and effort explaining (repeatedly) why we were doing something that wasn't in our organisation's DNA