Recommendations for Executive Management
Beware of the Tectonic Shift Afoot
Most everyone understands that Enabling Technology shifts create new business opportunities and can shake up markets. Too often, though, businesses are focused on new technologies as opportunities to reach customers or build new products for customers. This is particularly true when evaluating and comparing competitors. The Innovator's Dilemma always has smart people looking at the competition and saying "their product isn't as good", "their sales and marketing channels are inferior," or "their brand isn't trusted in the market."
More threatening, indeed what can become disastrous over time, is how enabling technology can play a background role in fundamental business configuration. This underlying, subterraneous technology plays a role in business operations, and is more or less invisible from outside the organization. So, Disruptive Innovation theory states that the organization that offers a better product does not win over time -- competition becomes asymmetric because of business configuration.
By this writing in 2025, the list of Enabling Technologies and Enabling Technology Accelerants is mind-blowing. Frankly, we spend a huge amount of time just tracking and playing with new developments. Broadly speaking, though, Generative AI and Agentic AI will leave nothing untouched, and has substantial impacts on almost every person at every role. And it will happen faster than anything has happened in human history.
The enabling technology environment used to create disruptive paths for innovators every decade, then it shrunk to five years, now it's probably at 2 years. It could be accelerating even faster.
No one would be exaggerating if they claimed it was at least a full time job just to survey everything afoot. What to do? Well, while there is a whole innovation cookbook needed to cover it all, we can narrow down a few musts:
The single greatest intervention an incumbent can make is to
- Monitor Asymmetric Competition
Utilizing On Demand Talent for "experiments" seems a prudent use of capital. However, there is a dark art skill set in managing consultants and contractors effectively.
Enterprise AI to blow your mind:
Align towards Coherence
We propose a new meaning to the word Coherence, in the context of technology initiatives and companies using State of the Art technology and practices in 2025. To put it bluntly and clearly, it's referring to
- how understandable an organization is from the point of view of someone wanting to get involved
- how frictionless it is to become a customer, to engage with customer support, share needs, get help, or help oneself by fulfilling informational needs.
A New Species of Company and Technology Platform
We believe the companies that have been started in the last five years have radically different characteristics than those that came before, to the extent it might as well be a new species.
Minimize Drag, Maximize Thrust
One simple guiding idea should be Thrust - Drag = Force, .
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Drag is usually event-driven, and comes from accepting bids from external demands on attention, time, and focus. Drag also arises from grassroots divergence of process and tool use, lack of clarity and the absence of common practice, competing demands, and distraction fatigue.
Drag might be defined as the sum of all the tiny friction and setbacks an organization experiences as they try to achieve their business objectives. While some drag is obvious, most drag is too subtle to notice. Drag is rife in today's workplace for knowledge workers, who need Deep Work to be radically productive.
Observations with Easy Fixes
There is no reliable, universal adoption of any of the Advanced Documents, Collaborative Documents applications. Laerdal clearly has accounts with Microsoft Loop, and Quip either comes with or is an add-on to Salesforce.
An area of Drag is that everyone seems to be designing their own slides, from scratch, with very little overlap in their design, layout, or digital assets used to make their slides compelling -- indicating no central Unified Design System that impacts everyone, anyone beyond the Design teams. and no Yet, there is one. It's in Figma.
In a brief moment of work-related discussion at the Christmas Party it's also clear that Laerdal my suffer from Collaboration Cost -- people may be experiencing meeting fatigue. Newer organizations, part of The New Wave of Startups, there is a strong consensus that the standard set of collaboration tools -- email, presentations, intranet, and enterprise data systems -- have long since found their limits. A rejection of their dominance is now mainstream in the popular literature, with books like Deep Work and Indistractable becoming best-sellers.
and an explosion of alternatives have come into being. In the past decade, Discussion Boards and Forums, Chat, various messaging clients, and Workflow Management tools have become mainstream.
And the harder thing to fix...
Drag can also come from Complexity Cost, when a company's organization and offerings exceed the capacity to keep up with happenings, understand problems and find solutions, or even just manage it.
Larry Page took the late Steve Jobs’s advice and admonitions very seriously: “The main thing I stressed was focus,” Jobs said. “Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.”
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Abstract your way to Simplicity
Externalize Knowledge
Let's assume that SharePoint is not effectively creating a high-level of Ambient Awareness. There's something about the way Laerdal has grown up, likely for strong and defensible decisions at the time, that has made it comparatively decentralized. This is fantastic, for the most part, and should enable emergent innovation. However,
Data Quality at the Source
After spending time in DataBricks, it’s clear that the quality of data coming out of Salesforce is mixed enough to prevent many kinds of systemic analysis and application building; or, at least make them an opaque challenge.
To give you some visible clarity, this was taken in the first 50 or so records. It's not just a small amount of the data, it's a huge proportion of the data:
!20250127_Data M&Ms at Laerdal.png
This is corroborated by comments coming from those trying to do Laerdal Connect, as well as the parts of the marketing team doing Marketing Automation, who worry that data at a per-customer level may be incomplete or inaccurate.
The Data & Analytics team has a process of cleaning and then refining data, but that can only be algorithmic and accomplished with programming techniques. Programs and Scripts can catch messy data, but it’s unlikely that it can correct inaccurate data, or fill in for incomplete data that requires greater context. In addition, it's a Drag. According to Hadley Wickham in his highly influential publication Tidy Data, data teams spend up to 80% of their time just Wrangling and cleaning data.
While "Top-Down Leadership" isn't always welcome, there are a number of instances where many are waiting for a mandate that can push everyone to do some work they maybe avoiding. A top-down push to fill in data completely, assure no typos or inaccuracies, and periodically tidy up could unblock some important initiatives.
Mandating that Sales and especially Sales Support spend an afternoon per month and a day per quarter tidying their data would pay enormous dividends over time. This kind of boring work can feel like drudgery, particularly to sales personalities and creatives. Yet, like many other areas of maintenance, can both enable key goals later and prevent Organizational Friction and Drag.
User Research at Scale from Sales
First things first, there is no reason every sales professional isn't using an AI Powered Transcription. The most loved AI note takers that also have fabulous REST APIs that can make the data easily accessed by other services are Fathom AI and Granola.
User Research is a mainstay of being a data-driven product-led organization. Yet, takes a lot of time. First, designers need to source expert interviews. While this may not sound like a Drag, its rare that designers have access to contact information, much less have trusted relationships with frontline or field professionals. So, it's usually an act of Wrangling. Second, it's difficult to establish patterns and developer personas without having 8-12 interviews with the same "type" of professional. Third, the data needs to be painstakingly organized by theme, tagged, and hopefully all appropriate metadata added.
Sales professionals typically vastly outnumber designers, and their role typically involves talking to various types of frontline, field professionals, managers and decision-makers -- often having 8 to 12 conversations daily. In a typical Inside Sales role, sales professionals typically do at least 40 outreaches per day. Moreover, getting these meetings is already in their workflow. They already know who the customers are, how to best reach them, which ones are more thoughtful and have more ideas and experiences that could be relevant to design.
Therefore, there are huge gains to be made in enabling the Sales Support organization to either encourage, prod, or require that front-line sales professionals engage in Design Research and Customer Development conversations.
Beware of software Lock In
Microsoft also clearly has significant Lock In at Laerdal, and Laerdal clearly defaults to choosing whatever Microsoft is offering, even when radically better alternatives are Best in class, lower cost, and even free and Open Source.
PowerPoint is not even close to the best presentation software. The utility of Microsoft Word has dropped dramatically in the face of Advanced Documents and the exponential embrace of Markdown as a content file format. Excel can still boast as the best spreadsheet software, but increasingly there are both Advanced Spreadsheets and Database Apps eating into the utility of Excel.
PowerBI is not even the Best in class for Business Intelligence. The most loved Business Intelligence tool is Mode. Yet, even using BI Tools are a bit of a crutch. Versatile Data Analysis tooling is abundant, in Open Source libraries and tools, and largely use Interactive Notebooks. This requires Scripting in Python or R, and increasingly Julia.
Azure is generally a very competitive and solid offering, with its main competitors being Google Cloud and AWS. Yet, if you need barebones cloud servers it's not the cheapest. And if you want ease of deployment it's not even close to slightly more expensive but mindblowingly easier options -- the Opsless Deployment Providers -- which include a mindnumbing set of options, but the ones for sure here to stay are Vercel, and Netlify, with honorable mention going to StackBlitz, Render, and Replit.
Our point is not necessarily that Laerdal transition off of Microsoft, nor Salesforce but that it would be reassuring to see a more thoughtful approach.
Create an Open Source team to chip away at vendor costs.
GitHub has fundamentally changed how software is made and distributed, and now many market entrants, or startups, default to Open Source methods to increase early traction with the developer community. At this point, pretty much any SaaS vendor has a more State of the Art challenger that is Open Source.
This, however, could sound daunting. Is it really a good use of time to have a whole team at Laerdal monkeying with open source software, when you Laerdal can just pay the software company and have it work out of the box? The answer, surprisingly, most probably.
This is because there are now One Click Deployments, with apps like Railway and DollarDeploy maintaining one-click installations and deployments.
Understand Platforms
While most businesses believe their day-to-day activities deliver value to customers, true platforms believe their core activities deliver an infrastructure for others to exchange value. They turn their customers into providers and their providers into customers.
To become a true platform, an organization needs to be highly focused on Platform Mechanisms.
a business can purposefully shift to become a platform, but it is founded on a shared mindset and a genuine commitment
Precision Products
The narrow scope of focus isn't just folklore of Silicon Valley. Karan Girotra and
Serguei Netessine mandate that businesses "focus narrowly" in their "Four paths to Business Model innovation" on HBR.
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Reading a report by Bessemer Venture Partners, Scaling to $100 Million
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what pops out when looking at this chart is that Slack and Twilio are two of the fastest companies to reach $100M in revenue. Missing from this chart is Stripe.
!Pasted image 20250128132033.png
Exercises that can help designers and product leaders get to a more precise product include using the Kano Model and the Strategy Canvas proposed in Blue Ocean Strategy.
Scenario Cloud by itself is probably a precision product that could reach $100M in revenue.
Understand Collaborative Pricing
In Defense of Maintenance
All software costs are backloaded into maintenance.Maintenance is always cheaper if it is regular and preventative.
[2] 2024, Aug "Four Paths to Business Model Innovation" HBR
[3] Schrage, Michael. 2013, Aug 20. 'Just How Valuable Is Google’s “20% Time”?'. HBR.