Tony Ennis's Blog Posts about Interesting People

"Incentives in the public sector are notoriously absent and/or misaligned, so the impetus for a salaried government employee to lobby for a change in software vendor rarely exists."
"There are estimated to be 40,000+ vertical market software which are potential targets for Constellation"
"VMS businesses were high gross margin and sticky, and selling mission-critical software that was instrumental in a buyer's operations"
"Our analysis of software vendors indicate substantial fragmentation with approximately 38,000 VMS vendors spanning more than 12 vertical markets, with the highest concentrations in Retail and Media & Services verticals – see Exhibit 8.
"Constellation has over 30,000 targets (adding 4k+ targets per year for the last 3-4 years). Each target has a contact name next to it, with the expectation of staying in contact 3-4 times a year"
"Human scale - All the employees know each other, and if a team member isn't trusted and pulling his weight, he tends to get weeded-out"
"The more likely outcome, is that the R&D manager isn't a brilliant workaholic and cannot cope as the team size exceeds double digits. Instead, he'll break his team up into multiple teams. A new level of middle managers will be born, with all the potential for overhead creation, politics, and bureaucracy that comes with another tier of middle managers."
"Something wonderful happens when you spin off a new business unit.” … “With a clean sheet of paper, the leader only takes those he needs. They set up in an open office with good communication and no overheads. They cover for each other. They leave all the bureaucracy and the crap behind"
"Don't share sales, R&D, HR, etc. because the accountants never get the allocations right and the business units always treat the allocated costs as outside their control"
"A Player/Coach continues to run their BU, but ambition drives them to acquire a sizable business, usually in another geography or another vertical"
"Our employee bonus plan requires that all employees who make more than a threshold level of compensation invest in CSI shares and hold those shares for an average of at least 4 years" - interesting
"One of the fundamental beliefs at CSI, is that autonomy motivates people, and bureaucracy does the opposite, so we try to do as many of the important monitoring tasks with as light a touch as possible."