Graduation speech for Lisbon MBA

I had the honor of recently delivering the graduation speech for the graduates of The Lisbon MBA program at Catholic University of Portugal. Here goes the full transcript.

A Cloud Platform before its time

In 2001, the group of founders got together and added the last details to the OutSystems business plan. We wanted to solve a big problem: fix the IT productivity issue of delivering large Intranet (browser-based internal apps) and Extranet (customer and partner portals…

Internacionalização

Introdução

Portugal é um país pequeno com 10,5 milhões de residentes. O nosso Produto Nacional…

Going abroad can kill you

We all know that Europe is not one country. Therefore we should all know that Europe is not one market territory. But as technology leaders, selling to the enterprise, we sometimes forget this fact. We look at Europe with its unified currency and outwards seemingly cultural habits…

Acid Test #2: The Problem Spotter Test

• Does your manager detect unforeseen problems when they are small?
• Does his team spot these problems when they are small?

There are people that through experience and intuition are good at spotting potential…

A culture of inclusion

I remember Cisco doing a pre-M&A due diligence on a former company I worked for. One of their must-have checklist items was the “size of the CEO office”. They had validated over, I am sure, a lot of trial and error that there was a negative correlation between the size of the CEO office…