...It's easy and natural for technologists tend to get caught up in a "bottom-up" view of what they're building (e.g. product capabilities), leaving well-intentioned yet challenged marketing groups to reverse-engineer "top-down" messages that quite often don't come together. 

The only solution is leadership.  Centralized leadership around creation of vision and mission, and centralized delivery of that same message (starting even before creation of the product), is key to effective decentralized execution.  And today, decentralized execution is what it's all about.  Conversely, if a product or service is built from the bottom up as a collection of powerful technologies or features, and if the vision emerges in a decentralized manner (at worst, by individual sales people, by analysts or journalists, by the market), execution is destined to be chronically weak.  The product won't be bought; it will need to be sold.

[Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

10:02:59 PM