Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age
Mark Schwartz
Praise for this book
War and Peace and IT offers a bold, insightful roadmap for building a company’s digital capacity. With the pace of change in IT accelerating at such an unprecedented rate, I consider this essential reading for my entire leadership team.
François Locoh-Donou, President & CEO, F5 Networks
Having worked with hundreds of executives from large enterprises in my roles at AWS, it is clear to me that every CEO and CIO should read this book… together.
Stephen Orban, General Manager at AWS & author of Ahead in the Cloud
If you want to learn how to embrace technology, respond effectively to ambiguity, and transform your business into an agile organization, then bring all your CXOs together and read this book with the CIO.
Chris Richardson, Chief Operating Officer, Tru Realty
I am buying several copies of this book for my colleagues across all of our business operations… not just business and IT.
Josh Seckel, Head of Agile Practice at Sevatec, Inc
This third book in the trilogy raises the most important issue—decisions need to be made and executed in real time.... and having gone through it with him at the Department of Homeland Security, I can tell you it was one of most impactful initiatives we ever undertook.
Luke McCormack, former CIO of the Department of Homeland Security
Napoleon couldn’t centrally manage his battles in real time, but today’s leaders have no excuse. Independent cell-based teams using rapid hypothesis testing will win the battles against competitors who remain old-school.
Adrian Cockcroft, VP Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS
With A Seat at the Table, thought leader Mark Schwartz pulled out a chair for CIOs at the C-suite table. Now Mark brings his unique perspective and experience to business leaders looking to lead their company into the digital age by harnessing the expertise and innovation that is already under their roof: IT.
In the war for business supremacy, Schwartz shows we must throw out the old management models and stereotypes that pit suits against nerds. Instead, business leaders of today can foster a space of collaboration and shared mission, a space that puts technologists and business people on the same team.
For business leaders looking to unlock their enterprise’s digital transformation, War and Peace and IT provides clear context and strategies. Schwartz demystifies the role IT plays in the modern enterprise, allowing business leaders to create new strategies for the new digital battleground.
It is time to change not only the enterprise’s relationship with technology but its relationship with technologists.
To accelerate, enterprises must bring technology to the heart of their work, for just as technology is causing this disruption, it is technology that provides the solution. Unlike Napoleon, it is time for business leaders to come down from the hill atop the Battle of Borodino and enter the fray with the technologists, for that is where the war will be won or lost.
What's inside
Business Perspective — Examine the relationship between the business and the technology pervasive throughout the company in this third book by Mark Schwartz.
Action Plan — Find the utility in the learnings with the action plan included in the book.
Leadership Learning — Discover an invaluable resource for business leaders looking to understand how the technology architecture and culture in their company impact outcomes.
Leadership Goals — This book is for IT and business leaders looking to share insights across the technology and business divide.
Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his CIO experience to bring strategies to enterprises or enterprises to strategies, and bring both to the cloud. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile processes in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or else he just thinks about it a lot.
