Versatile Amphibian

I'm using the lull between Christmas and New Year to gather my thoughts from 2014. It's been a crazy year: it feels like digital has finally hit the boardroom agenda in a more fundamental way than a technology or marketing investment. 'Early adopter' leaders understand that there are radical productivity and competitive advantages to adopting a digital culture and are thinking how to create one. That's not to say that I haven't seen a large number of executives and boards who want to brand a vanilla technology or go-to-market tweak as a radical digital initiative. It may surprise you to know that I have no issue with the latter approach to growth - I'm not a zealot and frankly many organisations do not yet face an existential crisis caused by the digital economy. Still more simply don't have the operating platform (capital, cultural, technological) in place to make any sort of radical change. The trouble is that if you brand something as a fundamental ...

Last week I wrote about a simple framework we're using to help organisations manage their digital portfolio. A client situation I often find is misalignment between how value is generated in the core and how the more radical innovation is structured. In one recent case the business appeared to make the majority of its money from selling products to middle class women, 30 to 45 years old. They had a couple of digital initiatives, which I'd classify as 'top left' - they did access a new type of customer with a new model, but were being delivered in a traditional operating structure. One of these was a high end D2C retail site aimed at rich, typically older men; the other an experiential site that showed 'power users' of the products how to use them in a more sophisticated way. The latter had no sales functionality although it did enable links into 3rd party e-commerce. There were no hybrids and the innovative businesses were located in different countr...

I thought it'd be useful to write a little about a little framework we've started to use quite a lot in Digital Strategy to categorise digital activities in an organisation's portfolio. The background to this is in the work we do to align executives on what digital means in their context and where they have capability gaps. We tended to find a couple of common issues: No one leader has a complete view of what digital ventures were being taken across the business There are rarely enough truly innovative projects... ...and those that there are tend not to be directed at specific corporate goals Organisations lack a means to take the lessons from innovation and apply them to optimise the main business In my experience about 70 percent of the energy (capital, time, attention) of a business should be directed on optimising the core activities. These are pure return on investment (ROI) calculations where a simple business case can be created. At the opposite end, te...

I finished reading Dave Eggers' novel The Circle the other day (aside: it's not bad, although nowhere near as close to the bone as some observers would have you believe). I was reminded of one of the central ideas to the novel in a chat with a colleague and that sparked a thought: if we can measure (and gameify) our fitness digitally in real time, could we do the same with our work? Or, in less management consulting language - is there a Fitbit for workers? In The Circle, employees of the eponymous firm are ranked on their participation in a range of internal and external communications. Their influence in the firm and the digital world is measured in real time as a proxy for their success in the social media firm. In the book, the score is a fairly simple numerical rank made up of a few key underlying metrics ('smiles', referred sales...). The key part that I like about the PartiRank idea though is that the employee takes personal control of their score. Most o...

A non-trivial amount of the work we do in Digital Strategy at the moment is focused on the design of digital operating models. I don’t particularly like the name, but the sentiment is about designing a business fit for the New Machine Age. As I’ve mentioned before, this philosophically means that it ultimately needs to become outcome- rather than process-centric. Making that happen means applying some new organisational and operational concepts to the business, one of which is an idea we’re beginning to talk about a lot: cadence. Cadence basically means the rate at which you do things. Businesses always have them. They’re part of the culture. In a PLC, they are quarterly to match the reporting cycle. In the public sector they’re often annual. In digital startups they could be as fast as weekly, to correspond with the tempo of an agile delivery ethos. Usually though a business has a natural speed and struggles to operate outside of it. The public sector struggles to act outside of ...

I’ve been doing a really interesting case with a client recently, helping them to use digital to reduce their expenditure on third party recruiters and simultaneously increase the variety and quality of new recruits that they obtain. Here’s a few high level thoughts from the work… The first - and perhaps most obvious – principle is that it’s time to treat employees and potential recruits like customers. Understand their archetypes and needs and engage them on their terms. Using classifieds or Linkedin only gets you to about half of the direct recruiting community and if you’re after graduates or under–35’s, you will need to think about how you use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in combination. If you want scarce talent, you’ll need to seek them out on their own terms and be proactive in targeting them.  Information in recruitment is now symmetrical and good people – hell, all people – are being constantly bombarded with interview offers thanks to a horde of recruitment co...

A few stories I've been reading this week (due to a Blogger fail, I lost rather a lot of others :(. ) Digital world It's fashionable to suggest that Android Wear has rendered Google Glass obsolete . I'm not so sure. If you believe in a Design Thinking approach, then this is the difference between the iteration of a known, successful category and the beginning of a new one. The miracle here is actually that Glass is as good as it is, not that Wear is functionally superior in many respects.  It's sort of like comparing the self-driving Google car with a similarly priced conventional vehicle. Allowing for development costs, that's something like a Bentley Continental. One is an ultimate expression of something that we've known how to do for years. The other is disruptive innovation. Move the development forward ten years and their ancestors will be radically differently positioned relative to each other. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/android-wear-smar...