Aunque normalmente soy un obsesivo viendo que tareas puedo cumplir durante el dia, veo que a veces, es muy satisfactorio no ser productivo en el sentido tradicional de la palabra. Como mi hijo esta de vacaciones, lo he traido al trabajo esta semana y ha sido una experiencia realmente increible.
Cuando entre al mercado digital de América Latina con mi empresa de mercadeo por Internet, esperaba encontrar que nuestra capacidad para ejecutar todas las actividades de eMarketing seria un claro diferenciador. También se me ocurrió que, de pronto, nuestro “expertise” en “web analytics” podría ser un gran diferenciador en el mercado. Lo que nunca me esperaba era que la capacidad para desarrollar un website o portal de una forma profesional seria el diferenciador mas contundente en vez de otra innovación digital.
He experimentado esto también como cliente de proveedores de diferentes regiones que incluyen India, Pakistán, EEUU y America Latina y puedo decir que, esta investigación de mercado personal, me demuestra que encontrar un desarrollador capaz, profesional y enfocado en producir un producto de alta calidad es casi similar a ganar la lotería. Esta frustración como cliente ha creado una nueva realización como empresario: promocionar nuestros servicios de creación de websites es una estrategia ganadora. Read more
Everyday, I’m continually fascinated by new things happening in different areas having to do with digital media such as social networking and the real-time web among others. Nevertheless, I’ve come to realize from bitter experience that actually getting websites or blogs constructed with a proactive, thorough and customer-oriented developer is virgin territory waiting to be exploited.
Now, I’m not talking about technical challenges and customer-developer brainstorming at the beginning of the project. I’m talking about incredible lulls in the work schedule where things just stop happening unless you, as the customer, ping your developer. In some instances, if one were to simply wait for the developer to perform the work that’s on the docket, you’d better wait sitting down ‘cause it’s not unusual for things to slide without continual monitoring. Read more
My Conversation with Zoho CEO, Sridhar Vembu
In my last post, I spoke about my conversation with Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corporation, an innovative software company headquartered in the US, but with most of their employees based in India and China. I wrote mostly about the ingredients of the company’s success. In this post, I’d like to delve a bit further into Sridhar’s vision and philosophy and its applicability to Latin America.
While I was speaking with Sridhar, I was reminded of John Hagel’s book, The Only Sustainable Edge. In it, Hagel mentions two important areas touched upon by the Zoho CEO. The first one has to do with Zoho’s ability to offer customers value at an affordable cost which is in synch with Hagel’s assertion that technology innovations are opportunities to “create more value at less cost.” Zoho’s location, recruiting, training and company culture paired with its bet on cloud computing make are certainly aligned to a goal of creating more value at less cost for their customers. Additionally, Hagel points out in his book that managing across two cultures “can create new opportunities to enhance performance by drawing on the best of both cultures.” Certainly, this is not news to Sridhar who lives and breathes it every day. Read more