leadership – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

November 22, 2019 By David Terrar

Steve Jobs and why Collaboration is so important

This is a shortened version of a post I wrote for our friends at Kahootz.

We believe a properly implemented company collaboration platform (or enterprise social network) is one of the key building blocks for an organisation to adapt to the fast changing business landscape and handle digital transformation more effectively. Why is collaboration so important? Why don’t we take some advice from Steve Jobs and his time with Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world? Watch Steve being interviewed for a few minutes and you get some great lessons on collaboration, teamwork, and real leadership that you can apply to your organisation:

What are Steve’s messages?

“Apple is an incredibly collaborative company”
How many committees at Apple? Zero! (think teams instead)
Apple is organised like a startup, the biggest startup on the planet
The senior leadership all meet once a week for 3 hours and talk about everything they are doing
“There’s tremendous teamwork at the top of the company which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company”
“Teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time”
Apple is great at figuring out how to divide things up in to great teams
“If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy – the best ideas have to win, otherwise people don’t stay!”

All of our research backs up these great ideas. Steve’s advice maps in to the Team of Teams approach that we highly recommend. The organisations that manage to connect all of their workers across their information silos work more effectively. The organisations that harness their people’s knowledge and collective intelligence generate more revenue, more profits and are worth more. But how do you put that in to practice?

Go over to Kahootz for the long version to hear how to put that in to practice, what can go wrong (and how to fix it).

If you want help on how to make your collaboration platform and approach more successful, or advice on choosing a platform and how to start, then please contact us.

March 14, 2019 By David Terrar

Reframing the Digital Transformation conversation in 5 steps

I’ve spent the last 2 days at Cloud Expo Europe, the premier London based event covering cloud platforms, hybrid and multicloud approaches, cybersecurity, AI, blockchain and more, as well as well as all of the ingredients of the data centres that support those technologies. A wide set of tech topics, but within them everyone’s talking digital transformation and it’s dangerous. Dangerous because, like talking cloud 10 years ago, it means different things to different people, becoming a catch all with too much emphasis on the technology itself, rather than the business outcomes it supports. It’s the classic mistake we technology marketers have been making with our “widgets” for decades. We need to reframe the digital transformation conversation!

First, how do we define it? On the first day I was chairing the Techerati Keynote theatre. During the stand out session of the morning an audience member asked the speaker that very question. The speaker was Ian Johns, Chief Architect at Kings College London, who was talking about how you should ride the wave of digital disruption, rather than being swamped by it. A message close to the heart of us Agile Elephants! His session properly explained the disruption we are all experiencing, and he did a great job of defining digital transformation too. I’m delighted that various blogs have referenced, and the latest Cloud Industry Forum research has adopted, our own definition which is:

“Digital transformation is the process of shifting your organisation from a legacy approach to new ways of working and thinking using digital, social, mobile and emerging technologies. It involves a change in leadership, different thinking, the encouragement of innovation and new business models, incorporating digitisation of assets and an increased use of technology to improve the experience of your organisation’s employees, customers, suppliers, partners and stakeholders.”

The crucial point is that emerging technologies and innovation are driving it, but the true transformation is all about business, mindset and leadership change.

Allan and Will interviewing me on the
Disruptive.Live studio/stand

I spent a lot of my time at the Expo with my good friends at Disruptive.Live co-hosting some of their live #Techerati interview shows, but then switching sides and coming on as a guest to be interviewed by Will Spalding and Allan Behrens (see later). “Where are we at with digital transformation?” was the first question they asked me. So if we put the technology aside for a moment, how do you go about integrating these new approaches while running your existing business? How do you reduce risk and increase your chances of success? I believe we need to reframe the conversation. Here are my five suggestions on how to do that:

1. Encourage good behavior

Digitally savvy companies have leaders who encourage teamwork, explain their purpose with clarity, and promote an environment of openness and sharing. The particular organizational structure you have in place is less important than getting employees and leaders to embrace these behaviors. In her book The Management Shift, Vlatka Hlupic shows that many successful companies share a management style characterized by an open mindset, an unbounded culture, strong team cohesion, inspirational leaders, a strong sense of purpose, and passion for the work the company does. Check out the absolutely excellent Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, Chris Fussell et al translating their experiences in Iraq War 2 to today’s complex supply chains where teamwork across organisational boundaries is crucial. These are the characteristics that 21st century leaders and managers need to be able to handle today’s rapidly changing business landscapes.

2. Think holistically

Adding mobile apps and new digital business components on top of existing systems can provide some help, and even give short-term benefits in key areas. To really transform your business, however, you need a holistic approach. According to recent Forrester research, most digitally mature businesses recognize that they must break down business silos in order to realize their digital visions. One helpful tool is the McKinsey 7-S framework, which has been tried and tested over decades. The 7-S framework emphasizes the role of coordination, rather than structure, in organizational effectiveness. First you assess the business in terms of strategy, structure, and systems. Then you examine your staff, skills, and style, as well as the shared values of the company. This approach helps to integrate all the factors needed to add value, find efficiencies, and make a real difference in your organization. You don’t have to use this particular framework, of course—there are many other useful tools out there. The point is that digital transformation becomes much easier when you think about it holistically.

3. Be agile

You need a plan to integrate your digital transformation project so that it works with your legacy systems. Your plan should draw on agile thinking while still satisfying the financial demands of the C-suite. Think in terms of short time scales and multiple iterations. Don’t fear experimentation or failure. The Forrester research already mentioned highlights agility as one of the top five metrics to measure the success of digital programmes. True agility requires you to think like a startup. First, identify the problem that needs to be solved with a new digital approach. Next, develop a minimum viable product that you can implement. Use the resulting feedback to improve and iterate your product. Pursue multiple, parallel streams of change with a six-to-eight-week cycle or shorter. Focus on achievable outcomes rather than individual tasks and steps, and be sure to foster regular communication at all levels across the process (back to Team of Teams).

4. Build a social network

True digital transformation touches all of a company’s teams and processes. You need sound cross-functional governance to get everyone on board with the disruption that’s to come. Our research shows that organizations that have implemented some form of enterprise social network or social collaboration platform, such as Workplace by Facebook, Jive, Microsoft Teams, Kahootz, GitHub or Slack, are more successful with their transformation than those that don’t. This kind of communication harnesses the collective intelligence of teams in ways that aren’t possible with old communications technologies such as e-mail.

5. Create your transformation story

Unless you are a digital native startup, your digital transformation will most likely be a complex series of incremental and strategic initiatives that fundamentally change the company over time. To get employees, customers, and investors on board, leadership needs to communicate the big idea—the “why” of what you are trying to achieve by reinventing your business. Start thinking about the principles of story telling. Start thinking in terms of the visual tools and communication processes you are going to use get the whole company as well as your partner and supplier ecosystem on board.

Here is the interview, with the answer that triggered this post. Allan and Will also ask me about Blockchain technology, and what I think of the show too:

Please check out the hashtags #techerati and #disruptivelive for more CEE19 content from this year’s show.

In summing up how to go about integrating digital transformation:

Digital transformation requires an open mindset, an unbounded culture, strong team cohesion, inspirational leaders, a strong sense of purpose, and passion for the work the company does.
You need agile thinking, a mix of incremental and strategic initiatives, and short development cycles.
Leaders must communicate why they are reinventing the company so that everyone is on board with the overall goal.
If you need help defining, adapting or communicating your particular digital transformation story, please contact us – we’d love to help.

Note – this post is an evolution of an article I wrote for enterprise.nxt the HPE Insights blog.

June 4, 2016 By David Terrar

Two lessons from Muhammad Ali on leadership

I’m sitting listening to the many tributes and reactions on the sad death of the greatest boxer of all time, the man who BBC viewers voted sports personality of the 20th century, somebody who was instrumental as an activist in the US civil rights movement of the 60s, who has died at the age of 74. He exemplifies leadership and I want to remember just two lessons from him.

The first was explained in When We Were Kings, the superb 1996 documentary about the “rumble in the Jungle” – the Don King arranged fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. In the last passage of the film, the great journalist George Plimpton is describing the intelligence and eloquence of Ali. He described Ali making a speech at a 1975 Harvard graduation ceremony which enthralled the audience. After he spoke, somebody shouted “give us one of your poems”, and Ali thought for a moment and said “Me…. We!”, which brought tumultuous applause. Plimpton goes on to say how he got this listed as the shortest poem in the English language. A poem which encapsulates in two words what the role and focus of a true leader is. That we are stronger, not from consensus but from the aggregation of our ideas and thoughts and decisions. The wisdom of crowds.

The second is the elegance of the punch that Ali never threw in that fight. He lands the winning punch, but has the humanity not to throw another. He watches Foreman go down with his fist cocked but does what most other fighters would not do. See it here:

We need leaders who think “we” rather than “me” and place themselves at the bottom of the organisation chart supporting their teams rather than pushing their heads to the top. We need leaders who think of the big picture and way beyond just winning.

Photo unknown – [1] Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989

March 19, 2015 By David Terrar

CeBIT SBA keynote – Strategic Building Blocks for your Digital Transformation Strategy

As my last post explained, I was privileged to do the opening keynote, substituting for Dion Hinchcliffe, at this week’s Social Business Arena at CeBIT 2015. The theme of the show was social as the enabler for digital transformation. I expanded on a session I did at the Enterprise 2.0 Paris Summit with some additional material on our 20 year journey in to a “world gone digital” since the publication of Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital in 1995. I added some Dion slides (but avoided doing a Dion impression) to explain the challenge that the typical CIO has dealing with legacy IT, edge IT and the shadow IT that is happening because their department isn’t being responsive enough.

We are living through a time of immense disruption. We explain it in the presentation as the Digital Enterprise Wave. IDC calls it the Third Platform. Gartner calls it the Nexus of Forces. It doesn’t matter what we call it, but it does mean that everyone’s business model is under threat. You need to transform, but how do you do it? First you have to get educated, and I suggest 3 books you might read covering the global forces at work, the management shift required, and the kind of leadership that organisations need to adopt to start real, digital thinking. Then I’ve added in our definition of Digital Transformation. There are several you can find (that I link to in my definition blog post) but we believe there are key ingredients missing from some of the explanations you can find. After that I work through 8 strategic building blocks you need to address to form the basis of the change that your organisations needs to go through. One important factor I bring in that is usually missed by so many is creativity. When we live in a world where content can appear to be free, or we can use low cost resource, or Amazon’s mechanical turk, competing with commodity ideas on price just won’t cut it. More than ever we need to be teaching our kids, our employees, our managers and leaders thinking skills, and we need to make our organisations live and breathe creativity. When your business is under threat and needs a reset, new ideas are the weapons that you need to make progress.

Here is the audio and slides from Monday’s keynote. They did video me, but I guess I was probably jumping around on stage in too animated or distracting a fashion. It was a blast – hope you enjoy it.

So my core message is that the most important of the 8 blocks is that you need to change your and your organisation’s mindset to a permanent state of re-invention.

Steve Jobs and why Collaboration is so important