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…

The Small Book of the Few Big Rules

OutSystems decided to launch a small booklet (The Small Book of The Few Big Rules) describing in simple terms the 7 rules of behavior that are the foundations for the OutSystems culture. A lot of friends and acquaintances have been sending me questions on the…

Peter’s Principle as seen by an engineer

The Peter Principle depicts a common situation all senior managers have to deal with sooner or later. It states that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” This problem is especially hard to tackle at young, fast-growing…

Speak to the layman

When you are planning on selling something to a lot of people I have found that a great exercise is to pretend that you have to explain it on national radio.

On radio you only have between 1 to 3 minutes to get the message through. This is great to train your elevator…

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…

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…

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…

“yeh, don’t bet on your own money. get funded. screw someone else”

yeh, don’t bet on your own money. get funded. screw someone else #TEDxEdges #OutSystems

This tweet appeared on the web as I was giving my closing remarks at TEDxEdges. I believe it got…