Cloud Stocks: Why Salesforce Buying Vlocity Proves the Growing Importance of PaaS

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) is dominating the news this week. Along with an outstanding quarterly result announcement, the company delivered two significant news items. First, Salesforce is acquiring Vlocity for $1.3 Billion. Salesforce also announced that its co-CEO Keith Block was stepping down from his position. Marc Benioff is back to being the sole CEO of the company.

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Spring 2019 Oracle – 1Mby1M Intrapreneurship Challenge Launches

The Spring 2019 Oracle – 1Mby1M Intrapreneurship Challenge has launched. Open to Oracle employees only who are interested to learn what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Become an Oracle Intrapreneur to take control of your future and accelerate your career. Submit your application found here by April 16, 2019. For a preview of the One Million by One Million program, please register to attend a FREE mentoring roundtable session here. If you are getting excited about applying, please have a look at Sramana’s interview with Paolo Juvara of Oracle Application Labs. Good luck!

Photo credit: Joey Rozier/Flickr.com.

One Form of Regenerative Energy: The Kaizen Feedback

By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

We all know about the natural tendency of systems toward their degradation. It’s called entropy. In her new book, Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis discusses the various ways organizations can fight that entropy, and instead, generate the negative entropy that Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger ended up naming “negentropy.” Thwarting entropy ultimately means breeding creative energy within the company non-stop by nurturing an environment that doesn’t inhibit imagination from the get-go and paying attention to all the sources of regenerative energy. What Delbourg-Delphis calls “kaizen feedback” is one of them. >>>

Innovation and disruption: Forces Turned on and off by human beings

By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

In her new book, Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis reflects on the demise and death of once-giants.

Companies either fail or succeed. It’s just a simple truth. There were certainly plenty of causes for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but the primary one, according to the famous 18^th century historian Edward Gibbon, was the gradual disappearance of its citizens’ civic virtues. Similarly, the main causes of companies’ annihilation could very well be human. Employees have stopped being citizens of their company and fighting for it. They behave. They aren’t causing problems or generating liabilities. They’ve just given up on the idea that their voice matters. >>>

Arka Venture Labs Partners with 1Mby1M to Accelerate Indian B-to-B Cloud Startups

Arka Venture Labs and the One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) global virtual accelerator announce a partnership to benefit Indian B-to-B cloud startups by together offering access to deeper connections into Silicon Valley and comprehensive startup mentoring.

Arka Venture Labs brings together three venture firms who provide the initial capital and open their networks to the benefit of their portfolio companies: Blume Ventures, BGV (Benhamou Global Ventures), and Emergent Ventures.

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Hiring for Innovation? Where do people “who have done it before” best fit in?

By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

In her new book, Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis draws from her extensive experience as a serial CEO, executive consultant, and board member to assesses the cons and pros of hiring people who “have done it before.”

Clichés have an advantage: they are self-explanatory. But the main drawback of these ready-made phrases is that nobody questions their meaning any longer. >>>

Companies don’t Innovate, People do… So, Watch how you Hire!

By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Almost every company pledges to value innovation, a topic that lends itself to all sorts of grand planning strategies and methodologies as well as lyrical musings. Yet to actually be able to deliver on innovation goals, organizations must often get back to earth, i.e. look closely at the multiple aspects of the management of the company’s human infrastructure, and focus on the most foundational of them: the way we hire. In her new book, Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis invites executives to pay attention to their company’s recruiting practices—and more specifically to two of the key principles that prepare companies for continuous inventiveness, hiring employees for their potential rather than only their current skills, and hiring people for the company as a whole rather than for a manager.  >>>

What Makes Startups Creativity Tanks?

By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Peter Cappelli, Professor of Management at Wharton School and Director of the Wharton’s Center for Human Resources endorsed Marylene Delbourg-Delphis’ book Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, saying “The energizing culture of the start-up world can be imported to even the biggest organizations. A powerful case for bringing the human element back into management.”

Startups are inspirational for many reasons. The “human element” is definitely one of them. >>>

NetApp Excellerator Startups Awarded Scholarships to the 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator

The One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) global virtual accelerator is yet another benefit granted to NetApp startups through a partnership between the two companies. For the second time this year, NetApp has awarded six startups one-year scholarships to the 1Mby1M Premium program, offering them the advantages of access to the 1Mby1M online curriculum, weekly online mentoring sessions and an international network of investors, potential customers, channel partners, and more.

The participating startups include:

CloudOptimo – Co-founded by Vaibhav Kamble and Tushar Chakote, CloudOptimo’s platform helps to reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a cloud infrastructure up to 80% using Cloud Provider’s excess capacity.

FirstHive – Founded by CEO Aditya Bhamidipaty, FirstHive is a Customer Data Platform that builds Unique Customer Identities by aggregating data from across all sources of customer interactions and customer transactions.

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EIT Health Partners with 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator to Train More Than 100 European Entrepreneurs

Digital Health Semifinalists of the European Health Catapult have been awarded one-year scholarships to the One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) global virtual accelerator thanks to a new partnership with EIT Health. In addition to the 15 scholarships to the 1Mby1M Premium program, EIT Health will also fund scholarships to 1Mby1M Basic for an additional 100 promising digital start-ups.

Sramana Mitra, Founder of 1Mby1M, announced the winners during the Semifinals, held on October 10 in Erlangen, Germany. You can listen to her keynote address, AI Powered Digital Health IS The Next Big Thing, here:

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