Venkat Atluri > Quotes

“the vast majority of unsuccessful ecosystem builds can trace their failure back to a flawed approach to governance. This is understandable because organizational structures designed for businesses in traditional sectors are ill-suited for ecosystem businesses that cut across sectors.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“But the platforms serve the central function of coordinating activities, structuring the relationship, and providing the backbone. For example, they provide billing and collection as well as ensuring the safety and security of all parties involved.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“As technology made everyday activities and business interactions easier, quicker, and more personalized, we as consumers became more and more demanding in our expectations. Consumers increasingly valued businesses that were able to predict what they wanted and deliver it to them instantly—or as close to instantly as possible.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Identify and leverage control points While building your ecosystem business, you need to pay close attention to the control points—like data. That is to say, identify the key steps in the customer journey that, if you control them, will allow you to gain an advantage over your competitors and form a deeper, closer relationship with your customers by meeting their needs holistically. Typically, important data sets make good control points. Therefore, you must identify and pursue the especially important data sets that will offer deeper and more meaningful insights into your customers’ needs. And beyond data sets, there could be many other things (e.g., access to customers) that could function as control points.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Within the emerging world of ecosystems, the goal is to own your customers, to follow and guide them on their journey and build a model that serves their needs at critical junctures.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“According to the nonprofit organization Greenleaf founded, “the key tools for a servant-leader [include] listening, persuasion, access to intuition and foresight, use of language, and pragmatic measurements of outcomes.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“important parts: The current situation: Taking into consideration your evolving customer base, your customers’ evolving needs, and your differentiated bets, ask yourself: Do I need an ecosystem to pull off the proposition?”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“In an ecosystem context, however, you need to focus only on the objectives and key results (OKRs) that are at the core of each agile chapter, tribe, or squad's work. As you do so, remember to always ask yourself: What objective did we give the teams, and what key results are we expecting them to drive?”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Competitive stance: What is your position relative to these competitors—especially the emerging ecosystem competitors? What ground can you stake out that will enable you to carry out your value proposition and remain more attractive than your ecosystem competitors?”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“One of the hardest parts of rising to the demands of the new ecosystem economy is the task of building an ecosystem-oriented business within an organizational framework that is simply not set up to do so. To successfully build ecosystem-oriented businesses, then, you will need to devise a new organizational model.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Avoid incrementalism You can't take baby steps. In every aspect of how you approach your ecosystem business, you need to be ready to make big, ambitious moves. First, aim high in terms of the value proposition you are looking to deliver. Second, be ambitious in terms of the partnerships you pursue and how you structure those relationships. And, third, be ambitious in terms of developing, fostering, growing, and maintaining the ecosystem.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“According to one study referenced in Forbes, between 2010 and 2020 “the amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed in the world increased from 1.2 trillion gigabytes to 59 trillion gigabytes, an almost 5,000% growth.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“In the decade between 2010 and 2020, the number of internet-connected devices in the world more than doubled.8”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Ask yourself: What assets or capabilities do you need to be successful in this comfort-and-safety-as-a-service proposition? For example, you would need the capability to assemble and distribute the necessary HVAC equipment, security cameras, and other physical infrastructure. This, fortunately, may be a capability you already possess as an equipment manufacturer. But chances are that such a player would lack at least a few other critical capabilities. For instance, you would need the ability to install and maintain that equipment, which may go beyond the scope of your current operation. Perhaps most importantly, you would need an online platform to connect all the devices, sensors, and other equipment—allowing for the creation of digital twins for real-time remote digital monitoring. This online platform would also allow customers to make adjustments, access camera footage, and manage their subscription, all in one place.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“The rise of AWS and other cloud computing providers, in turn, helped to drive still more innovation, lowering the cost of computing power and fueling the conditions that drove the emergence of Ecosystem 1.0 in the first place. Startups, suddenly, could get the IT services they needed at a variable rather than a fixed cost—what Amazon called “pay as you go.”28 This created opportunities for new players, but it also made it much easier for established companies to enter new sectors, especially digital ones, and compete in unexpected ways.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“into several key areas: Assessment of customer needs and customer base: How are your customers’ needs, preferences, and consumption patterns going to change in the future as technology evolves and other trends progress? Think about this not just in terms of your current sector or industry—but rather, consider the influence that other industries and sectors will exert on your sector and how they will shape your customers’ needs.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“They may even have the potential to change the basis of competition in the home space by developing new and different ways of getting compensated—by creating entirely new and potentially radically different business models. For example, a cloud player offering comfort and security as a service may choose to bundle that service with other cloud services—or even subsidize one service with the proceeds from the other. They may also choose to bring other revenue sources like data collection or advertising into the mix in an effort to offer customers a better price point. All of this would put more traditional players at an extreme disadvantage.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“The first thing to understand is that to survive in the new ecosystem economy, you will need to expand both the breadth and depth of your relationships. That is to say, you will need to drastically expand the number of partners you are working with, but you will also need to make those relationships count for more.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“In the agile model, and especially in the context of the servant leadership mindset, it is not uncommon to have weekly or even more frequent check-ins—not in a punitive or adversarial way, but simply to find whatever roadblocks are standing in the team's way and to ensure that everyone has what they need to move forward.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Another potential advantage you might have is a first-mover advantage—obviously, if you are the first out of the gate, you will enjoy a head start over your rivals, especially if you can achieve a so-called network”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“In traditional performance management models, working teams present to leadership in performative, high-stakes monthly or quarterly reviews. By keeping these reviews on such an infrequent cadence, both sides can lose sight of what the real purpose of the review is: to support and sustain the work, and to ensure that everyone is moving together toward the desired results. Such an approach is ill-suited to the ecosystem economy. When you have agile tribes, chapters, and squads working on dynamic, cross-sectoral value propositions, you need to push your performance management process toward a much more frequent operating cadence.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Start with the customer and end with the customer In the ecosystem economy, customers and their needs should be the highest of all priorities. Ecosystem businesses should be designed around the value propositions you are making to your customers.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“As the Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase pointed out, the reason companies exist is to cut down on transaction costs—and in many cases, such savings proved attractive enough to warrant bringing together an extremely varied collection of business activities under one corporate roof.5 This was the impulse that gave rise to conglomerates.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“The driving principle of ecosystems is that they are built around customers—they fulfill customers’ needs and desires on a deep level.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Ultimately, ecosystems are about building community and bringing different parties with different interests together—in the true spirit of serving customers’ best interests.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“So many companies understand that they need to evolve their propositions but underestimate the scale at which change is needed. To do so effectively, you need to think backward from the future, not forward from the present—but this does not necessarily mean that you need to emulate tech companies or try to envision what amazing futuristic technologies we will have in 50 years. Instead, you need to fundamentally rethink how you define your customers’ needs, your customer base, your industry, your proposition, and the competitive landscape.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Among them, you are almost certain to see Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta.2 How would you classify these companies? To say they're tech companies would be an oversimplification. Apple offers credit cards and runs the App Store, which provides customers with everything from food delivery to exercise classes to ride sharing. Amazon runs a large chain of grocery stores and owns the movie studio MGM. The difference between the list of top companies in years past and today reflects a colossal economic reorientation, the significance of which is only now beginning to be felt.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“Lastly, when you think about improvements, make sure you consider every key stakeholder, not just your customers. For example, in the ecosystem context, make sure you focus on significantly improving the experience for your partners, too.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“No consumer has ever felt a deep desire for a mortgage—what consumers want is a home, and acquiring a home involves a great deal beyond just a mortgage, including products and services that come from multiple different industries.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders

“At their core, ecosystems form around human needs and desires. The boundaries between different sectors of the economy arose from logistical concerns not related to human needs and desires. The rise of ecosystems, therefore, is the expression of what humans really want—made possible through advances in technology and organization. So in the future, as technology continues to improve, we will see human needs and desires expressed more and more clearly in the organization of ecosystems.”
― Venkat Atluri, The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders