The Digital Transformation People Newsletter #8

Welcome to issue #8. In the run up to Christmas, we won’t indulge ourselves with any early reference to it except to say that come our next newsletter we will have something special for you! Watch this space and the image above will in retrospect seem a bit of a clue.
Tim Ellis, Founder

STRATEGY

In Digital Transformation, The Art-of-the-Possible and Average Practice Are Diverging
By Dion Hinchcliffe
“The application of average practice that, while proven, will assuredly put most organizations into the also-ran list and fail to propel them forward digitally in a meaningful way.” Find out what you need to do to move up the digital maturity curve. In the flat and hyper-competitive world of the Internet, average practice is just not sufficient to thrive, nor to survive. Organizations must find ways to learn and evolve faster, more widely, and with much more scale than in the past.

Seeking Strategic Advantage? Break Down Walls and Cultivate Networks
By John Hagel
The sources of advantage are shifting in ways that most companies don’t yet understand, much less effectively harness. John Hagel discusses the new way to build competitive advantage by finding, harnessing and occupying influence points in the new network economy.

Ideas Don’t Matter In Innovation & Entrepreneurship
By Alexander Osterwalder

“The biggest challenge in innovation and entrepreneurship is not the search for THE idea, nor is it about the execution of an idea.” ~ Alexander Osterwalder co Founder of Strategyzer.
So what is the secret sauce required for success?

RECOMMENDED READING

Digital Transformation: Build Your Organization’s Future for the Innovation Age
If you’re looking for the definitive ‘how to’ book on managing a digital transformation then we’d recommend taking a look at this superb book by Lindsay Herbert – Author, Speaker & Digital Leader Digital at IBM iX.
It’s clear, concise and a practical guide from someone with an immense amount of experience in the field, with plenty of insights from customer case studies too. 


HOW TO

The psychology behind stories: what ALL digital advertisers need to know
Anyone who wants to communicate an idea should know about the power of story telling. Here’s a great article on why it’s so effective from Dale Lovell, CDO of AdYouLike. 

Your Company Doesn’t Need a Digital Strategy
“As sexy as it is to speculate about new technologies such as AI, robots, and the internet of things (IoT), the focus on technology can steer the conversation in a dangerous direction. Because when it comes to digital transformation, digital is not the answer. Transformation is.”
~ George Westerman MIT Sloan author, researcher and speaker

Digital@Scale: The Playbook You Need to Transform Your Company:
A summary by Rob Llewellyn, CXO Transform
This book provides practical insights into three key elements of digital transformation and authors Jürgen Meffert & Anand Swaminathan offer a blueprint for reinventing the core of a business. It will go some way towards helping leaders understand that digital is far broader and more fundamental than what they’ve been led to believe by some of the hype surrounding it. 


PEOPLE & CHANGE

What’s the organizing principle of today’s digital workplace?
If you’re struggling with how to organise your work force for the future, then this article from Dion Hinchcliffe may help as he outlines the challenges organisations face, and four common models to help them organise their digital workplace.

HR must deliver on Transformation
Two-thirds of the CEOs of the European Fortune 500 enterprises have Digital Transformation (DX) at the centre of their corporate strategy. Transformation of the workforce, the way it is utilised, managed and improved, is a central feature to this process and many HR professionals will be tasked with keeping pace and delivering change. Here’s a look at HR transformation from SAP Success Factors and IDC


TECHNOLOGY
Interview With The Lifelike Hot Robot Named Sophia
If you can see past the word ‘hot‘, this is a profound interview with the lifelike Sophia discussing emotion, trust, consciousness, self awareness, empathy and demonstrating humour.. she’s also been granted Saudi citizenship … imagine where we’ll be with this in 10 years time!

Some things AI can do and some things it can’t 
By Kevin Gray
Kevin Gray is a marketing scientist and expert in delivering insights. Here’s his analysis and views on what AI is, and what it can and can’t do. 

Atlas, The Next Generation from Boston Dynamics
In case you missed it, this video of Atlas the backflipping robot from Boston Dynamics shows just how far robotics has come. 


D

 

LEADERSHIP

What’s your Purpose, Mission and Vision?
Former Royal Marines Officer Roderic Yapp explores the key ingredients required for building high performance teams.

Digital Transformation – Part I: It’s All About Networks
“If leaders want to build resilient organizations that have the wherewithal to rapidly adapt to disruptive change, the first task of digital transformation is to learn how to build and lead highly effective distributed networks.” ~ Rod Collins


TALENT

The Digital Talent Gap—Are Companies Doing Enough?
It’s interesting that technological advances have profoundly moved demand towards the softer skills and attributes of customer empathy and a passion for learning.

Find the best talent to drive your cloud and digital transformation
By Mary E. Shacklett, President, Transworld Data
A look at the challenges and options available for talent acquisition for digital transformation. Once again with digital transformation requiring significant user interaction it’s the softer and interpersonal skills that are in demand. 


“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down simply by spending his money somewhere else”
~ Sam Walton, Founder of Walmart


IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

You Adapt, or you Adopt, or you Die
Here’s a gem from Steve Blank the initiator of the Lean Startup movement speaking about his experience as an entrepreneur, the culture of investment and an anecdote about Steve Jobs gives an insight into where his genius lay.  Watch out also for “Mum I just lost $35m…” and her answer!


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