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...

I was talking to a couple of colleagues about how to change the culture of businesses the other day (as you do). Someone commented that they didn’t know how to make the culture of a client ‘digital’. His implication was that there needed to be uniformity of culture in order to succeed at making a transformation to a more productive operating model, which struck me as odd. Why would cultural uniformity be a good idea? What business actually has that today? What’s a 'digital culture' at all? Is also a good question. I currently describe it as something that’s outcome centric, that has hierarchy that serves to resolve areas of debate rather than for command and control and devolves leadership to everyone in the organisation based on philosophical alignment about what needs to be done. My description changes quite a lot, it’d be fair to say, but this is the June 2014 version. What about cultural uniformity, then? Well, I started to think about this and to be honest I could...

One of the problems we've found with digital strategy thus far is how to get organisations started. There are so many ways in which digital can transform a business, from radically transforming sales and service to automating a swathe of back office tasks that it can be overwhelming and doing nothing or something too small is tempting. To us as well, at times. So I've been thinking about the best way of biting off a meaningful chunk - these are thoughts in progress so comments are even more appreciated than usual! The first question I came to was whether to start at the value generating centre of the business or in a costly but unsexy back office area. My conclusion is the former. Why? Because energy and momentum is a crucial part of the journey to a digital culture and it's easier to advertise that direction somewhere visible. It's also arguably easier to make a conventional (basic ROI) business case in these areas - the cost of back office functions is often very murk...

The last couple of days have seen two remarkable developments in digital that I thought were worth covering. First, Google announced that it would be making 200 prototype self-driving city cars to its own design. Second, Microsoft revealed its plans to put he natty instant translation tech it showed off in China a couple of years back into Skype. Why were these titbits of news worth interrupting my holiday for? I've long been an advocate of self-driving vehicles and Google have long been the visible face of the technology. Their announcement will undoubtedly spur others to launch their own vehicles, most likely including Tesla, who have done for propulsion what Google have done for guidance. I would be now very surprised if a fully self-driving car was not available for purchase at an electric-sized price premium (c. 50%) vs the equivalent conventional car before 2020. Microsoft's translation announcement is also significant as it shows how quickly natural language algorithms h...

You might remember that we've been doing a series of consumer research pieces with the Associated Press on the future of news in various regions. This leg of the journey took us to the Middle East, where we covered three markets: UAE, KSA and Egypt. I presented this at the Arab Media Forum this afternoon. Major findings: Middle Eastern residents are avid consumers of the news - on average they'll take in 72 minutes a day, which is the same as their counterparts in Europe Trust is the most important driver for selecting a news channel. Interestingly, speed is almost irrelevant - only six percent of respondents said that it mattered, which goes against traditional thinking... ...and probably reflects the fact that social currency from news is gained by depth of understanding rather than being the first person to hear about it Half of online news users discover stories on social media and 45 percent of users share a story at least once a day This reflects the importance o...

I’m still trying to sort my thoughts about the Mobile World Congress. To start with, here’s my Match of the Day style summary of the two best things I saw at MWC and the two worst things I saw at MWC… I liked: Ubuntu Tablet Ubuntu is best known as a server O/S, but they also offer a smartphone and now a tablet version of the open source O/S. The tablet version is extremely slick and easy to navigate: apparently they have some partners ready to launch hardware for it this year (although it installs seamlessly on a Google Nexus tablet). I know it won’t catch on, but it was still really nice to see some innovation in interface design. I didn’t like: the way the industry is missing the point Mobile is the hot topic in many industries, particularly when it comes to providing very localized sales, marketing and other services. The cellular industry is in a prime place to enable this sort of new commerce market. So why was it nowhere to be seen at MWC? Because it seems that t...

I know the drill by now. Drink as much coffee as I can. Avoid any cooked foodstuffs.  The Nokia stand has the best freebies. These sage pieces of advice hold true at MWC 2014 and, while my brain is still on a caffeine high, I thought I’d jot down my impressions of day 1 at the FIRA. One – there are a lot of cars From ZTE to Telefonica to Qualcomm, everyone in the value chain has cars on their stand. TF win the cool stakes by having a Tesla Model S, which is an awesome piece of technology… but although automotive telematics is clearly a market that they all want to play in, no one is doing very much of substance. Telefonica provide a SIM card for the Model S. Qualcomm were showing off a stereo system and sat nav processor; ZTE an extremely weak connected car app. What I take from this is that cars are carrying much more computing and connectivity than ever before (no shit) and no one in the telecoms value chain has figured out how to make money out of them. Two ...

I read with interest Satya Nadella's first email to Microsoft staff as CEO. It's inspiring stuff and says a lot about his understanding of the future digital world that we'll  inhabit. He's much better equipped than Steve Ballmer to win in that world. He likes hoodies, for a start. But Satya's got a problem, and that problem is one of Microsoft's strongholds: the corporate IT department. I love all the words that he uses in his email - fun, excitement, clarity, the accomplishment of great things. Trouble is that the way most people experience Microsoft these days is at work. And that desktop and application experience is controlled by the IT department. And for the most part, that IT department will have created a "build" of services that stops the average Jo Bloggs doing very much that's exciting or fun. Accomplishing great things is pretty tough on a glacially slow Windows XP, Vista or 7 machine loaded with bloated apps and locked down aga...