Page 196 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

group as a whole is sorting the information and seeing who
stands out, who guides the discussion at critical moments, and
who has a sustained drive to address the topic. This is one of
many tasks of the traditional middle manager, but as many
of us know, their knowledge was limited, sometimes preju-
diced, and difficult to convert into action. Furthermore, there

are a lot fewer of them around, good or bad. In the slimmed-
down lean corporation, social networking is going to have to
serve as one of the substitutes. It will allow employees to get
new ideas, learn something that will solve a problem, and in
general share in the knowledge of how the business is sup-
posed to work.
If you do not believe this, consider the fact, now long es-

tablished in Silicon Valley, that many of the most successful
companies have two equal cofounders. Bill Hewlett and David
Packard formed HP in a garage in Palo Alto. Steven Wozniak
and Steve Jobs, two men with vastly different skills and per-
sonalities, formed Apple Computer in another garage. Sergey
Brin and Larry Page formed Google and collected $100,000
in investment before they had a bank account in which to
deposit it. The modern Amazon.com with Amazon Web Serv-
ices is the creation of both Jeff Bezos and CTO Werner Vogels,

who has pushed hard toward the Web Services and EC2 cloud
business.
Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist with Hummer Winblad
Venture Partners in San Francisco, looks for such teams that
are still at an early stage of company formation and considers
them strong prospects for success. One of the reasons is that
they stay on course more easily than a solitary founder by him-

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