Tech News Digest April 17

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Great Technology Leaders Reimagine, Reinvent, Innovate and Transform to Drive Superior Strategy for the Modern Enterprise in a Time of Global Crisis 

This is a moment of transformation change. Great leaders will ramp up and accelerate their efforts to reimagine, reinvent, innovate and drive value across the enterprise. They will deepen and extend the strength of their relationships in the C-suite and boardrooms, and open new paths to success in receptive markets. They will complete the pivot to digital and embrace the new normal. They will thrive and succeed.

At HMG Strategy, we cover what matters most to you: Courageous leadership, inspiration, hope, resiliency, accelerating career ascent, driving a winning agenda and making the world a better place.

Is the glass half empty or half full? I bet that most of us in our amazing industry would say it’s half full. From the perspective of the modern technology leader, we have been given the rare opportunity to genuinely transform our ourselves and our companies. Let’s not waste this opportunity.  Let’s learn from it, let’s build on it and let’s collectively find the good in these difficult times.

I firmly believe that by working together and leveraging our incredible talents and abilities, we will emerge stronger and better from this crisis.

Our primary mission at HMG Strategy is enabling and supporting you: the modern technology leader. We focus exclusively on the issues and challenges that you face in your role as trusted advisor, counselor, pioneer, innovator and technology leader.  That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in our research agenda. We fully understand your needs, because we live in your world, and we look forward to working with you in the months and years ahead.

We are the world’s largest independent global platform for technology leaders, with a growing network of 400,000+ technology executives. Our global, social and digital platform has expanded significantly, and we welcome you to visit the HMG Strategy Digital Resource Center to learn directly from the most innovative leaders of our time.  As we continue to grow, we have launched unique executive services that include HMG Ventures, the HMG CIO & CISO Executive Leadership Alliance (CELA), Executive Decision Support (EDS) CELA, and HMG Adventures.

I’ll be writing more about our pivot to digital in Monday’s newsletter. Stay safe, be well and have an excellent weekend.


Register Now for More HMG Live! Experiences Next Week

Join us next week for two more high-value HMG Live! experiences featuring top-tier technology leaders and executives.

Monday at 11 am Eastern, I’ll be interviewing Bhavani Amirthalingam, SVP & CDO at Ameren. Register here for this unique and timely virtual briefing.

Thursday at 1 pm Eastern, I’ll be hosting our San Francisco Virtual Summit, featuring Sheila Jordan, CDO at Honeywell; Larry Quinlan, Global CIO at Deloitte; and John Repko, EVP and CIO at AIG. Register here for this truly amazing summit.

We’ll be presenting a rich series of high-value virtual events, summits, briefings and webinars, designed exclusively for technology leaders and executives. I urge you to visit the HMG Live! page on our website and learn more about our rich and genuinely unique schedule of digital experiences.


Apple Launches New Inexpensive iPhone

It might seem counterintuitive to launch a new product in the midst of a global crisis, yet Apple’s introduction of a new iPhone is well timed. At a moment when everyone depends more than ever on their mobile phones, Apple is has made an excellent business decision.

“The new iPhone SE arrives with a lower price: At $399, it costs about 40 percent less than the regular $699 iPhone. The device has the design of an older generation of iPhones, with the same computing power as newer ones. That means the SE looks like an iPhone from 2014, with a smaller screen and a home button instead of a face scanner, but is as fast as the fancier iPhone 11 from 2019,” writes Brian X. Chen of the New York Times. “Apple typically holds splashy events to introduce new products. But because of the pandemic, the company instead live-streamed a product executive showing a slide show of images of the new iPhone to make its announcement.”


Verizon Announces it Will Buy BlueJeans, a Video Conferencing Platform

Verizon, in a strategic move aimed at expanding its market and competing with rivals such as T-Mobile and AT&T, has announced plans to acquire BlueJeans, a video conferencing company.

Verizon will pay about $400 million in the deal, CNBC’s David Faber reported. BlueJeans has more than 15,000 customers, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said in an interview with Faber shortly after the deal was announced,” writes Lauren Feiner of CNBC. “Many enterprise tools like ZoomSlack and Microsoft Teams have seen an uptick in usage as more American regions have been instructed to stay at home to tamp down the spread of the virus. The acquisition shows Verizon is looking to be a part of that movement as businesses still struggle to reopen offices.”


Guidance for Finding a Path to the New Normal

For a change of pace, I recommend taking a look at this article by Ross Chainey of the World Economic Forum. Chainey’s article focuses on some excellent leadership advice offered by Adam Grant of the Wharton Business School, and it’s definitely worth reading.

“Leaders could take the opportunity to give their employees more control and, hopefully, discover that they can trust them to manage their own schedules … Leaders may want to become more hands-on in learning about their employees’ values, interests, strengths, and motivations. Meanwhile, organizations as a whole may embrace home working and continue to experiment with different ways of working after the crisis is over,” Chainey writes.

From my perspective, this feels like a good description of the new normal. As leaders, we’ve got to be ready to embrace new ideas and innovative strategies for guiding the enterprise through this time of extraordinary global crisis.


Lessons Learned and Advice for Leaders

Here is a quick roundup of extremely useful articles from the Harvard Business Review on the topics of remote work, virtual meetings and digital leadership skills:

Preparing Your Business for a Post-Pandemic World by Carsten Lund Pedersen and Thomas Ritter
How to Keep Your Team Motivated, Remotely by Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi
How to Be an Inclusive Leader Through a Crisis by Ruchika Tulshyan
Don’t Let Your Obsession with Productivity Kill Your Creativity by Bruce Daisley
10 Digital Miscommunications – and How to Avoid Them by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy

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