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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
One of the strengths of the US lies in the self organizing nature of its citizens. Football (soccer) clubs that host thousands of kids in suburban towns are run in a self organized hive of activity, where parents act as investors, managers, coaches and referees…
This insightful article from Thomas Wailgum at CIO.com summarizes the typical situation organizations face when having to adapt commodity software to a changing business and to their specific processes.
It’s only fair that I start this blog with a comment on the OutSystems NextStep’09 conference, held in Lisbon, the past April 15,16. We have come a long way since our first NextStep (2004). As a lot of friends and business associates congratulated me on how much…
The past years have matured the use of web technologies in optimizing business functions. From the initial experimentations with portals and Intranets to today’s wikis and a recent slew of innovative types of systems based on social…
I stumbled on this piece from Clay Shirky on situated software. Interesting notion: as you decrease the size of the user target base your (social) software can leverage the non-tech links that exist in these micro communities and create services…
I have been thinking on whether situated software happens in the enterprise. And I figured out that it not only happens but it is a common occurrence. It occurs at the edge of the enterprise, inside departments where business people know…