On Monday, ZeroDivide graduated the second class of our Zfellows at the wonderful Museum of the African Diaspora located in San Francisco. (I recommend checking out their new exhibit: Africa.Dot.Com: From Drums to Digital.)

We invited, Ed Batista, leadership mensch and executive coach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, to present at the event. He wrote up his remarks at edbatista.com:

I believe the strategic aspects of technology that have the greatest potential to actually make a difference in an organization fit into on the other side of the 7s Model, the “soft” side:

I couldn’t agree with this more. Read his whole post.

Too often, I think we analyze the cost/benefit of technology by counting the nuts and bolts and boxes and circuits. Instead, we should be looking at the benefits of technology from a perspective of skills, leadership, and culture.

I like to think of technology as a doorbell. Install it, wire it up, make sure it works, but then focus on using it to get people to open the door, and don’t worry too much about the specification of the doorbell itself.