The Tep Times
TEP CONFERENCE – INTERNATIONAL WEEK – OCTOBER 2016 – #TEP2016
New Tools and Concepts
To Grow, Expand, and Stay Relevant
Is Software Having General Management for Dessert?
By New York International
T
EP was founded in 2011 with the
belief that the fast exchange of
new concepts and ideas is vital
for global economies. We started with a
transatlantic perspective, which has since
become a broader vision connecting tech
ecosystems around the world. Originally,
we focused on the media and publishing industry. Media was not only being
challenged by new technology, but fundamentally disrupted—maybe like no other
industry at that time.
The threat has not gone away, and the
most successful media companies continue to transform themselves in order to
persist and thrive. At this year’s conference, we will hear from ESPN, News Corp,
Axel Springer, and others with a status
update on their transition to becoming
technology and media companies. While
this is interesting in itself, the 2016 TEP
conference aims to explore the bigger picture of change. What can other industries
learn from top media companies and their
approach to change—both strategically
and operationally? What are the con-
cepts, tools, and fundamental approaches
to business that we can learn from media
companies?
One of the crucial trends we have been
following is that product design, especially for software-intense products, is
increasingly developed differently than
traditional engineering. Remember when
we used to get everyone on the same page
and ensure resources were properly allocated, through planning? At our best a
thought-through plan was diligently designed, tested, and then brought to market; engineers implemented those plans
and were expected to at least aspire to
perfection.
Software development on the other
hand often seems messy; never perfect,
never on time and always a work in progress. This way of developing products and
services is finding its way into general
business management. These anti-hierarchy approaches sometimes appear as
Holacracy, DevOps, or sometimes just
“purpose driven organizations.”
As Marc Andreessen of leading venture
capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz famously proclaimed, “software is eating
the world.” Now it seems software is having general business practices and managers for dessert.
This year we are going to explore what is
real and what is just hype in these trends
and management approaches. This is a
huge topic, one that matters for all sorts
of businesses and even for cities and governments. It is fundamental if you want
to attract the best and brightest in the US
these days, either as employees or customers.
The time seems right to have this conversation. Longtime TEP participant
Christoph Keese described the wave of
new ideas, concepts, and technologies
coming from the US across the world in
his 2014 book Silicon Valley. Books and
articles like Sprint by Jake Knapp, Agile
by Darrell Rigby, and Do More Faster
by Techstars founders David Cohen
and Brad Feld are being translated into
other languages now. Even the Harvard
Business Review has published many articles on Holacracy and DevOps. Global
businesses outside the US will soon get
a closer look into where and how general
management will develop in the twen-
ty-first century. This year at TEP we’ve
brought in successful software entrepreneur Evan Powell to share his observations on the cultural shift in the way
technology is built and run—a shift that is
transforming businesses worldwide.
TEP has always aimed for impact—real
tangible signs of progress. We have helped
many startups with their first steps into
the US market by supporting them in getting funding or just helping them learn
how to run a better business and get more
traction. What are we most proud of?
Probably the Start Alliance by our longtime
partner Berlin Partner. The first companies
are starting to leverage closer city collaboration through the alliance to expand faster
and cheaper than ever; see page 3.
Many of these thought leaders you will
meet at the 2016 TEP conference in New
York. As always, we’d like to be measured
by the single word, sentence or person that
you’d not heard or met before and that
profoundly changed the way you think
about business, government or maybe
life—the right size of ambition for New
York City. Welcome to the 2016 TEP conference!