\u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, changing corporate culture is not easy. Therefore, organizations must experiment with alternative organizational structures that impact the organizations most innovative employees\/ units. For instance, Wendy\u2019s, the restaurant chain giant, started 90 Degrees Labs<\/a>, a corporate innovation hub that reports directly to senior management. The lab frequently bypasses other organizational units to collect data directly from employees, customers, and other stakeholders as well as to release innovative experiments to be tested both internally and \u201cin the wild.\u201d By creating a shadow organization within the main organization, Wendy\u2019s can experiment with digital transformation even as the rest of the organization takes time to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organizational view is approaching digital transformation as an organizational challenge and not a technology challenge. When viewing digital transformation as a technology issue, management ends up missing a crucial aspect of innovation: corporate culture. \u201cYou may have the brightest and most progressive people, but they will flounder in a culture that stifles innovation,\u201d says Duncan Tait<\/a>, CEO, SEVP, and head of Americas and EMEIA at Fujitsu. Culture, a byproduct of organizational structures and systems, plays a key role in corporate innovation. For leadership to engender innovation, they must be willing to implement structures that favor collaboration in the context of disruptive innovation and organizational creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, changing corporate culture is not easy. Therefore, organizations must experiment with alternative organizational structures that impact the organizations most innovative employees\/ units. For instance, Wendy\u2019s, the restaurant chain giant, started 90 Degrees Labs<\/a>, a corporate innovation hub that reports directly to senior management. The lab frequently bypasses other organizational units to collect data directly from employees, customers, and other stakeholders as well as to release innovative experiments to be tested both internally and \u201cin the wild.\u201d By creating a shadow organization within the main organization, Wendy\u2019s can experiment with digital transformation even as the rest of the organization takes time to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organizational view is approaching digital transformation as an organizational challenge and not a technology challenge. When viewing digital transformation as a technology issue, management ends up missing a crucial aspect of innovation: corporate culture. \u201cYou may have the brightest and most progressive people, but they will flounder in a culture that stifles innovation,\u201d says Duncan Tait<\/a>, CEO, SEVP, and head of Americas and EMEIA at Fujitsu. Culture, a byproduct of organizational structures and systems, plays a key role in corporate innovation. For leadership to engender innovation, they must be willing to implement structures that favor collaboration in the context of disruptive innovation and organizational creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, changing corporate culture is not easy. Therefore, organizations must experiment with alternative organizational structures that impact the organizations most innovative employees\/ units. For instance, Wendy\u2019s, the restaurant chain giant, started 90 Degrees Labs<\/a>, a corporate innovation hub that reports directly to senior management. The lab frequently bypasses other organizational units to collect data directly from employees, customers, and other stakeholders as well as to release innovative experiments to be tested both internally and \u201cin the wild.\u201d By creating a shadow organization within the main organization, Wendy\u2019s can experiment with digital transformation even as the rest of the organization takes time to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another strategic area that business leaders must consider is return on investment. The challenge here is that most leaders view digital transformation and resultant innovation through a Wall Street lens of quarterly earnings and shareholder value. However, this approach flies in the face of how Silicon Valley investors approach innovation, which is through a valuation approach. For example, Tesla may not have a strong balance sheet but this has not prevented the company\u2019s valuation from skyrocketing. So, businesses must be ready for this tension between balance sheet investing and valuation investing when it comes to investing in innovation. By looking for a return on innovation tied to the overall impact of the innovation on the organization and not just the balance sheet, organizations can foster strong corporate innovation that enjoys management support, and that helps the company transform gradually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organizational view is approaching digital transformation as an organizational challenge and not a technology challenge. When viewing digital transformation as a technology issue, management ends up missing a crucial aspect of innovation: corporate culture. \u201cYou may have the brightest and most progressive people, but they will flounder in a culture that stifles innovation,\u201d says Duncan Tait<\/a>, CEO, SEVP, and head of Americas and EMEIA at Fujitsu. Culture, a byproduct of organizational structures and systems, plays a key role in corporate innovation. For leadership to engender innovation, they must be willing to implement structures that favor collaboration in the context of disruptive innovation and organizational creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, changing corporate culture is not easy. Therefore, organizations must experiment with alternative organizational structures that impact the organizations most innovative employees\/ units. For instance, Wendy\u2019s, the restaurant chain giant, started 90 Degrees Labs<\/a>, a corporate innovation hub that reports directly to senior management. The lab frequently bypasses other organizational units to collect data directly from employees, customers, and other stakeholders as well as to release innovative experiments to be tested both internally and \u201cin the wild.\u201d By creating a shadow organization within the main organization, Wendy\u2019s can experiment with digital transformation even as the rest of the organization takes time to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an interview with SVIC, Gregory LaBlanc, Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley pointed out that corporate innovation starts with top management asking strategic questions about the organization. These questions include: \u201cHow can we forge ahead as a tech company? What would it mean to be a digital-first company operating in our industry? What would it mean for decision-making if we embraced big data and predictive analytics?\u201d These questions and others enable the corporation to explore the core aspects of digital transformation \u2013 ecosystems, platforms, and digital business models. This approach also helps focus leadership and management on how to retrofit the organization as a tech company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another strategic area that business leaders must consider is return on investment. The challenge here is that most leaders view digital transformation and resultant innovation through a Wall Street lens of quarterly earnings and shareholder value. However, this approach flies in the face of how Silicon Valley investors approach innovation, which is through a valuation approach. For example, Tesla may not have a strong balance sheet but this has not prevented the company\u2019s valuation from skyrocketing. So, businesses must be ready for this tension between balance sheet investing and valuation investing when it comes to investing in innovation. By looking for a return on innovation tied to the overall impact of the innovation on the organization and not just the balance sheet, organizations can foster strong corporate innovation that enjoys management support, and that helps the company transform gradually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organizational view is approaching digital transformation as an organizational challenge and not a technology challenge. When viewing digital transformation as a technology issue, management ends up missing a crucial aspect of innovation: corporate culture. \u201cYou may have the brightest and most progressive people, but they will flounder in a culture that stifles innovation,\u201d says Duncan Tait<\/a>, CEO, SEVP, and head of Americas and EMEIA at Fujitsu. Culture, a byproduct of organizational structures and systems, plays a key role in corporate innovation. For leadership to engender innovation, they must be willing to implement structures that favor collaboration in the context of disruptive innovation and organizational creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, changing corporate culture is not easy. Therefore, organizations must experiment with alternative organizational structures that impact the organizations most innovative employees\/ units. For instance, Wendy\u2019s, the restaurant chain giant, started 90 Degrees Labs<\/a>, a corporate innovation hub that reports directly to senior management. The lab frequently bypasses other organizational units to collect data directly from employees, customers, and other stakeholders as well as to release innovative experiments to be tested both internally and \u201cin the wild.\u201d By creating a shadow organization within the main organization, Wendy\u2019s can experiment with digital transformation even as the rest of the organization takes time to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an interview with SVIC, Gregory LaBlanc, Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley pointed out that corporate innovation starts with top management asking strategic questions about the organization. These questions include: \u201cHow can we forge ahead as a tech company? What would it mean to be a digital-first company operating in our industry? What would it mean for decision-making if we embraced big data and predictive analytics?\u201d These questions and others enable the corporation to explore the core aspects of digital transformation \u2013 ecosystems, platforms, and digital business models. This approach also helps focus leadership and management on how to retrofit the organization as a tech company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another strategic area that business leaders must consider is return on investment. The challenge here is that most leaders view digital transformation and resultant innovation through a Wall Street lens of quarterly earnings and shareholder value. However, this approach flies in the face of how Silicon Valley investors approach innovation, which is through a valuation approach. For example, Tesla may not have a strong balance sheet but this has not prevented the company\u2019s valuation from skyrocketing. So, businesses must be ready for this tension between balance sheet investing and valuation investing when it comes to investing in innovation. By looking for a return on innovation tied to the overall impact of the innovation on the organization and not just the balance sheet, organizations can foster strong corporate innovation that enjoys management support, and that helps the company transform gradually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organizational view is approaching digital transformation as an organizational challenge and not a technology challenge. When viewing digital transformation as a technology issue, management ends up missing a crucial aspect of innovation: corporate culture. \u201cYou may have the brightest and most progressive people, but they will flounder in a culture that stifles innovation,\u201d says Duncan Tait<\/a>, CEO, SEVP, and head of Americas and EMEIA at Fujitsu. Culture, a byproduct of organizational structures and systems, plays a key role in corporate innovation. For leadership to engender innovation, they must be willing to implement structures that favor collaboration in the context of disruptive innovation and organizational creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, changing corporate culture is not easy. Therefore, organizations must experiment with alternative organizational structures that impact the organizations most innovative employees\/ units. For instance, Wendy\u2019s, the restaurant chain giant, started 90 Degrees Labs<\/a>, a corporate innovation hub that reports directly to senior management. The lab frequently bypasses other organizational units to collect data directly from employees, customers, and other stakeholders as well as to release innovative experiments to be tested both internally and \u201cin the wild.\u201d By creating a shadow organization within the main organization, Wendy\u2019s can experiment with digital transformation even as the rest of the organization takes time to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Digital transformation is at the heart of established corporations that are reshaping themselves as \u201cstartup corporations.\u201d Companies like GM, Caterpillar, and Walmart, while traditionally non-tech companies have embraced digital transformation and today utilize digital capabilities similar to those found at companies like Google and Microsoft to continue leading in their respective industries. compete with tech-first companies like Google and Microsoft regarding digital technology capabilities. However, the path to digital transformation is not just about adopting new technologies; it is about reshaping the entirety of the company to become a digital-first enterprise. As such, digital transformation is not the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel itself that leads to growth and innovation. In this article, we explore three key areas leaders, and senior executives need to focus on to infuse digital transformation in their organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an interview with SVIC, Gregory LaBlanc, Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley pointed out that corporate innovation starts with top management asking strategic questions about the organization. These questions include: \u201cHow can we forge ahead as a tech company? What would it mean to be a digital-first company operating in our industry? What would it mean for decision-making if we embraced big data and predictive analytics?\u201d These questions and others enable the corporation to explore the core aspects of digital transformation \u2013 ecosystems, platforms, and digital business models. This approach also helps focus leadership and management on how to retrofit the organization as a tech company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another strategic area that business leaders must consider is return on investment. The challenge here is that most leaders view digital transformation and resultant innovation through a Wall Street lens of quarterly earnings and shareholder value. However, this approach flies in the face of how Silicon Valley investors approach innovation, which is through a valuation approach. For example, Tesla may not have a strong balance sheet but this has not prevented the company\u2019s valuation from skyrocketing. So, businesses must be ready for this tension between balance sheet investing and valuation investing when it comes to investing in innovation. By looking for a return on innovation tied to the overall impact of the innovation on the organization and not just the balance sheet, organizations can foster strong corporate innovation that enjoys management support, and that helps the company transform gradually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organizational view is approaching digital transformation as an organizational challenge and not a technology challenge. When viewing digital transformation as a technology issue, management ends up missing a crucial aspect of innovation: corporate culture. \u201cYou may have the brightest and most progressive people, but they will flounder in a culture that stifles innovation,\u201d says Duncan Tait<\/a>, CEO, SEVP, and head of Americas and EMEIA at Fujitsu. Culture, a byproduct of organizational structures and systems, plays a key role in corporate innovation. For leadership to engender innovation, they must be willing to implement structures that favor collaboration in the context of disruptive innovation and organizational creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, changing corporate culture is not easy. Therefore, organizations must experiment with alternative organizational structures that impact the organizations most innovative employees\/ units. For instance, Wendy\u2019s, the restaurant chain giant, started 90 Degrees Labs<\/a>, a corporate innovation hub that reports directly to senior management. The lab frequently bypasses other organizational units to collect data directly from employees, customers, and other stakeholders as well as to release innovative experiments to be tested both internally and \u201cin the wild.\u201d By creating a shadow organization within the main organization, Wendy\u2019s can experiment with digital transformation even as the rest of the organization takes time to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Historically, corporate innovation is not a novel occurrence. What is different now is the push for corporate innovation in the face of rapid disruption brought about by advances in digital technologies. Corporations that have long established themselves as leaders in their respective industries are having to rethink their entire businesses to adapt to the fourth industrial age. As digital technologies go mainstream, the need to pivot is not only a profit-driven requirement but an existential one that companies must adopt to survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Digital transformation is at the heart of established corporations that are reshaping themselves as \u201cstartup corporations.\u201d Companies like GM, Caterpillar, and Walmart, while traditionally non-tech companies have embraced digital transformation and today utilize digital capabilities similar to those found at companies like Google and Microsoft to continue leading in their respective industries. compete with tech-first companies like Google and Microsoft regarding digital technology capabilities. However, the path to digital transformation is not just about adopting new technologies; it is about reshaping the entirety of the company to become a digital-first enterprise. As such, digital transformation is not the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel itself that leads to growth and innovation. In this article, we explore three key areas leaders, and senior executives need to focus on to infuse digital transformation in their organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an interview with SVIC, Gregory LaBlanc, Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley pointed out that corporate innovation starts with top management asking strategic questions about the organization. These questions include: \u201cHow can we forge ahead as a tech company? What would it mean to be a digital-first company operating in our industry? What would it mean for decision-making if we embraced big data and predictive analytics?\u201d These questions and others enable the corporation to explore the core aspects of digital transformation \u2013 ecosystems, platforms, and digital business models. This approach also helps focus leadership and management on how to retrofit the organization as a tech company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another strategic area that business leaders must consider is return on investment. The challenge here is that most leaders view digital transformation and resultant innovation through a Wall Street lens of quarterly earnings and shareholder value. However, this approach flies in the face of how Silicon Valley investors approach innovation, which is through a valuation approach. For example, Tesla may not have a strong balance sheet but this has not prevented the company\u2019s valuation from skyrocketing. So, businesses must be ready for this tension between balance sheet investing and valuation investing when it comes to investing in innovation. By looking for a return on innovation tied to the overall impact of the innovation on the organization and not just the balance sheet, organizations can foster strong corporate innovation that enjoys management support, and that helps the company transform gradually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organizational view is approaching digital transformation as an organizational challenge and not a technology challenge. When viewing digital transformation as a technology issue, management ends up missing a crucial aspect of innovation: corporate culture. \u201cYou may have the brightest and most progressive people, but they will flounder in a culture that stifles innovation,\u201d says Duncan Tait<\/a>, CEO, SEVP, and head of Americas and EMEIA at Fujitsu. Culture, a byproduct of organizational structures and systems, plays a key role in corporate innovation. For leadership to engender innovation, they must be willing to implement structures that favor collaboration in the context of disruptive innovation and organizational creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, changing corporate culture is not easy. Therefore, organizations must experiment with alternative organizational structures that impact the organizations most innovative employees\/ units. For instance, Wendy\u2019s, the restaurant chain giant, started 90 Degrees Labs<\/a>, a corporate innovation hub that reports directly to senior management. The lab frequently bypasses other organizational units to collect data directly from employees, customers, and other stakeholders as well as to release innovative experiments to be tested both internally and \u201cin the wild.\u201d By creating a shadow organization within the main organization, Wendy\u2019s can experiment with digital transformation even as the rest of the organization takes time to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey to corporate innovation is often one that blends both a response to external disruptive pressures as well as a need to digitally transform the organization to drive internal innovation. Going back to Wendy\u2019s, the establishment of the innovation lab was in response to disruption happening across the restaurant industry. The focus of the lab, however, is to infuse digital transformation into the organization, something Wendy\u2019s hopes will result in disruptive innovations of its own. As such, an innovation view should focus on getting the right structures in place that result in disruptive innovations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the strategic and organizational views, business leaders will need to focus their efforts on streamlining processes, resources, and capital to foster innovation. For instance, utilizing tools used in startups like agile methodologies and business model innovation can help the corporation better nurture emerging in-house innovations to create future growth either internally or as new business opportunities. Also, focusing on a return on innovation will help the organization avoid the deadly return on investment trap, which tends to nip innovation in the bud by pressuring teams to generate quick revenue returns, something true innovation often does not do very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rapid disruption is upon most industries. Organizations of all sizes find themselves at a crossroads with a sign that says, \u201cInnovate or Die.\u201d The path to innovation, however, still poses a major challenge to organizations. Nevertheless, by approaching digital transformation through the three views highlighted above, organizations can avoid disruption and instead become the ones disrupting both their businesses and those of competitors. The bottom line remains that digital technologies are reshaping the market landscape. Where businesses end up amid this reshuffle depends on how swiftly and effectively they can digitally transform their businesses to better align with the emergent fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Digital Transformation: The Key to Rapid Corporate Innovation","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-12-27 20:45:15","post_modified_gmt":"2019-12-28 04:45:15","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/siliconvalley.center\/blog\/digital-transformation-the-key-to-rapid-corporate-innovation\/","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":646,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2018-09-19 14:41:00","post_date_gmt":"2018-09-19 21:41:00","post_content":"\n \u201cThere are tech companies, and then there are dead companies.\u201d This statement is the hard-hitting truth Gregory LaBlanc has for companies mulling over whether to implement a digital transformation strategy or not. Gregory is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. We recently caught up with him to ask him what companies can do to survive the fourth industrial age. \u201cIf you think about it,\u201d Gregory says, \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as a tech sector on the stock market anymore. While the media and Wall Street like to call the likes of Google and Apple tech companies and others like GM and Monsanto non-tech companies, the reality is these are all tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory is right. A company like GM, while categorized as an automaker, has more software developers than Google. United Airlines and UPS utilize more technology than most tech-first companies. According to Gregory, the notion of what a tech company represents is fast disappearing. What is emerging are tech companies that do other things. For instance, Google is a tech company that does advertising; UPS is a tech company that delivers packages; Amazon is a tech company that sells merchandise; GM is a tech company that sells cars, and so on. This distinction is important, Gregory asserts, for businesses that want to survive in a digital era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most businesses think digital transformation is all about technology, Gregory disagrees. \u201cDigital transformation is a management problem, not a tech problem,\u201d Gregory says. Looking back at the history of technological revolutions, the companies that were able to respond from a management and operational perspective to integrate the technology of the day were the ones that won. This demarcation is essential for business leaders concerned with what technologies are emerging and how best to take advantage of them. Gregory advises that the first step to digital transformation is to optimize management and organizational structures to better assimilate and utilize new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this perspective, Gregory points out that organizations do not need any new conceptual skills or models to thrive in the digital era. Instead, they must adopt tried and tested management strategies centered around a learning organization. These are organizations that learn and adapt in response to new information. Management structures must, therefore, be optimized to support the requirements of a learning organization. In Gregory\u2019s words, leaders must become \u201chuman APIs,\u201d able to assimilate technical information and apply domain expertise to glean actionable insights on how to move the organization forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll industrial revolutions have been driven by increases in resource utilization,\u201d says Gregory. What has changed with this new industrial revolution is that the availability of data has made it possible to increase resource utilization to levels previous revolutions did not manage to achieve. Consider the sharing economy. While most commentators may point to the consumer habits of millennials as the driving force of the sharing economy, this is not the complete picture. What we see with millennial behavior is a symptom of the structural changes occurring across industries and not the cause. Through improved real-time data-driven resource allocation, the need to own things is fast becoming obsolete, a factor that is propelling the sharing economy. For businesses to take advantage of this new trend, they must move away from being product companies to being service companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory explains, \u201cThe product business model is on its way out, and this is being driven by ever-increasing capacity utilization.\u201d For instance, the current utilization of motor vehicles in the US stands at around 5%.<\/a> Digital transformation, through ridesharing and other similar technologies, has the potential to drive this number up by reducing the number of hours vehicles remain idle through the day. This shift will not be reflected in Gross National Product (GNP) numbers but in the increased satisfaction consumers have. This trend will simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while cutting the number of car units sold, number of parking lots needed and so on. This level of resource utilization will not only reshape the automotive industry but create new industries like autonomous car manufacturing and supporting technologies like charging stations and idle car park retrofitting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company with the most data wins.\u201d That\u2019s Gregory\u2019s summation of how important data is to the modern organization. He continues by pointing out that it\u2019s not data about specific customers that matters, but data about an aggregate marketplace. Take Facebook for instance. The amount of marketplace-specific data they have makes them untouchable in their space. The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of AgTech giant Monsanto, has an app called Climate FieldView<\/a> that has mapped out close to 70% of all arable land in the United States through IoT enabled farm machinery. These sets of data act as an insurmountable moat against competitor threats. So, how can companies utilize data to win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile large companies can afford to perform data-driven discovery where they manipulate mountains of data to try and find trends, this is the wrong approach for smaller companies,\u201d Gregory intimates. Instead, he says, they should start by asking how more data can help them find answers for existing and hypothetical questions. Put another way, how can data better offset the limitations of ignorance that every company faces? To get this approach right, companies must invest in balancing out their teams to better interpret this data. If the organization is too technical then business cases will be missed; if the team is too business heavy, then technical opportunities derived from data interpretation will be missed. The right mix will ensure a company has a truly functional team in place to take advantage of data-driven decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow can businesses start the process of reinventing themselves for the digital era?\u201d we asked Gregory. \u201cIt all starts with how you think of your business,\u201d he says. If you are a product business, what would it mean to become a service business? If you consider yourself a non-tech company, what would it mean to become a tech company? If you make hardware, what would it mean to be a software-first company? What would it mean to be a fundamentally data-first company where information and data are at the heart of your competitive advantage? Asking these questions will help reorient a company\u2019s thinking about what their business model is. Gregory concludes, \u201cThis is the first step to reinventing your business for the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But businesses cannot always respond to change in the same way that consumers do. While a consumer can risk a few dollars to try out a new service or product, large organizations are constrained by risk management measures. They cannot afford to take bold risks at the expense of the business. Steve and Geoff advise such businesses to embrace a culture of Minimum Viable Moves. This could be through the formation of an innovation lab or a corporate venture capital arm tasked with investing in startups. Steve adds that businesses must intuit what will be delightful to the customers that they are trying to serve and take every measure to deliver delightful experiences to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most established organizations use financial projections to inform the strategic direction of the organization, or as Geoff puts it, they staple strategic planning processes to an annual financial forecast. This thinking creates a gap between what the business is doing and what customers expect. When this gap remains unaddressed, disruption occurs. \u201cThat\u2019s the essence of disruption: it\u2019s something that makes the consumer\u2019s life, or a technology that makes it possible for a consumer\u2019s life, to be meaningfully different,\u201d says Steve, \u201cand businesses that don\u2019t adapt to those new possibilities will eventually just become irrelevant to the consumers.\u201d Steve and Geoff call human behavior the subatomic layer of any business. They assert that every business outcome is because of human behavior. \u201cYou cannot change your performance review, you cannot grow, you cannot improve your margin unless someone somewhere changes their behavior,\u201d says Geoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But businesses cannot always respond to change in the same way that consumers do. While a consumer can risk a few dollars to try out a new service or product, large organizations are constrained by risk management measures. They cannot afford to take bold risks at the expense of the business. Steve and Geoff advise such businesses to embrace a culture of Minimum Viable Moves. This could be through the formation of an innovation lab or a corporate venture capital arm tasked with investing in startups. Steve adds that businesses must intuit what will be delightful to the customers that they are trying to serve and take every measure to deliver delightful experiences to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most established organizations use financial projections to inform the strategic direction of the organization, or as Geoff puts it, they staple strategic planning processes to an annual financial forecast. This thinking creates a gap between what the business is doing and what customers expect. When this gap remains unaddressed, disruption occurs. \u201cThat\u2019s the essence of disruption: it\u2019s something that makes the consumer\u2019s life, or a technology that makes it possible for a consumer\u2019s life, to be meaningfully different,\u201d says Steve, \u201cand businesses that don\u2019t adapt to those new possibilities will eventually just become irrelevant to the consumers.\u201d Steve and Geoff call human behavior the subatomic layer of any business. They assert that every business outcome is because of human behavior. \u201cYou cannot change your performance review, you cannot grow, you cannot improve your margin unless someone somewhere changes their behavior,\u201d says Geoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But businesses cannot always respond to change in the same way that consumers do. While a consumer can risk a few dollars to try out a new service or product, large organizations are constrained by risk management measures. They cannot afford to take bold risks at the expense of the business. Steve and Geoff advise such businesses to embrace a culture of Minimum Viable Moves. This could be through the formation of an innovation lab or a corporate venture capital arm tasked with investing in startups. Steve adds that businesses must intuit what will be delightful to the customers that they are trying to serve and take every measure to deliver delightful experiences to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizations with playbooks and cultures optimized for linear growth will find themselves playing catch-up in the market if they do not adjust. Realizing that this exponential change is only starting to accelerate, organizations must embrace new orthodoxies and ways of thinking that allow them to experiment with new technologies and new approaches. One way to do this is by undertaking what Steve and Geoff call Minimum Viable Moves (MVMs). These are actions taken by an organization to test new ways of doing things without impacting the overall business. Borrowing from the phrase Minimum Viable Product popular in startup circles, focusing an organization on undertaking inexpensive and non-risky MVMs can help introduce new capabilities to an organization quickly and efficiently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most established organizations use financial projections to inform the strategic direction of the organization, or as Geoff puts it, they staple strategic planning processes to an annual financial forecast. This thinking creates a gap between what the business is doing and what customers expect. When this gap remains unaddressed, disruption occurs. \u201cThat\u2019s the essence of disruption: it\u2019s something that makes the consumer\u2019s life, or a technology that makes it possible for a consumer\u2019s life, to be meaningfully different,\u201d says Steve, \u201cand businesses that don\u2019t adapt to those new possibilities will eventually just become irrelevant to the consumers.\u201d Steve and Geoff call human behavior the subatomic layer of any business. They assert that every business outcome is because of human behavior. \u201cYou cannot change your performance review, you cannot grow, you cannot improve your margin unless someone somewhere changes their behavior,\u201d says Geoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But businesses cannot always respond to change in the same way that consumers do. While a consumer can risk a few dollars to try out a new service or product, large organizations are constrained by risk management measures. They cannot afford to take bold risks at the expense of the business. Steve and Geoff advise such businesses to embrace a culture of Minimum Viable Moves. This could be through the formation of an innovation lab or a corporate venture capital arm tasked with investing in startups. Steve adds that businesses must intuit what will be delightful to the customers that they are trying to serve and take every measure to deliver delightful experiences to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In previous industrial revolutions, growth was mostly linear, explains Geoff. Companies at that time had the opportunity to observe and assess technological advances and then integrate them once they matured. They did this without losing their competitive edge and without having to take any major risks. Today, the rate of change is no longer liner \u2013 it is exponential. While at the start of the information age, Moore\u2019s Law dictated the rate of change, today, as Steve says, \u201cthe impact really has to do with not just the technology itself, but it\u2019s all the technology upon the computing power which, in turn, changes how people behave and what\u2019s possible.\u201d The result of this \u201ctechnology stack\u201d is the combinations of those technologies accelerate the disruption to business models and the pace at which this disruption is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizations with playbooks and cultures optimized for linear growth will find themselves playing catch-up in the market if they do not adjust. Realizing that this exponential change is only starting to accelerate, organizations must embrace new orthodoxies and ways of thinking that allow them to experiment with new technologies and new approaches. One way to do this is by undertaking what Steve and Geoff call Minimum Viable Moves (MVMs). These are actions taken by an organization to test new ways of doing things without impacting the overall business. Borrowing from the phrase Minimum Viable Product popular in startup circles, focusing an organization on undertaking inexpensive and non-risky MVMs can help introduce new capabilities to an organization quickly and efficiently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most established organizations use financial projections to inform the strategic direction of the organization, or as Geoff puts it, they staple strategic planning processes to an annual financial forecast. This thinking creates a gap between what the business is doing and what customers expect. When this gap remains unaddressed, disruption occurs. \u201cThat\u2019s the essence of disruption: it\u2019s something that makes the consumer\u2019s life, or a technology that makes it possible for a consumer\u2019s life, to be meaningfully different,\u201d says Steve, \u201cand businesses that don\u2019t adapt to those new possibilities will eventually just become irrelevant to the consumers.\u201d Steve and Geoff call human behavior the subatomic layer of any business. They assert that every business outcome is because of human behavior. \u201cYou cannot change your performance review, you cannot grow, you cannot improve your margin unless someone somewhere changes their behavior,\u201d says Geoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But businesses cannot always respond to change in the same way that consumers do. While a consumer can risk a few dollars to try out a new service or product, large organizations are constrained by risk management measures. They cannot afford to take bold risks at the expense of the business. Steve and Geoff advise such businesses to embrace a culture of Minimum Viable Moves. This could be through the formation of an innovation lab or a corporate venture capital arm tasked with investing in startups. Steve adds that businesses must intuit what will be delightful to the customers that they are trying to serve and take every measure to deliver delightful experiences to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In previous industrial revolutions, growth was mostly linear, explains Geoff. Companies at that time had the opportunity to observe and assess technological advances and then integrate them once they matured. They did this without losing their competitive edge and without having to take any major risks. Today, the rate of change is no longer liner \u2013 it is exponential. While at the start of the information age, Moore\u2019s Law dictated the rate of change, today, as Steve says, \u201cthe impact really has to do with not just the technology itself, but it\u2019s all the technology upon the computing power which, in turn, changes how people behave and what\u2019s possible.\u201d The result of this \u201ctechnology stack\u201d is the combinations of those technologies accelerate the disruption to business models and the pace at which this disruption is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizations with playbooks and cultures optimized for linear growth will find themselves playing catch-up in the market if they do not adjust. Realizing that this exponential change is only starting to accelerate, organizations must embrace new orthodoxies and ways of thinking that allow them to experiment with new technologies and new approaches. One way to do this is by undertaking what Steve and Geoff call Minimum Viable Moves (MVMs). These are actions taken by an organization to test new ways of doing things without impacting the overall business. Borrowing from the phrase Minimum Viable Product popular in startup circles, focusing an organization on undertaking inexpensive and non-risky MVMs can help introduce new capabilities to an organization quickly and efficiently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most established organizations use financial projections to inform the strategic direction of the organization, or as Geoff puts it, they staple strategic planning processes to an annual financial forecast. This thinking creates a gap between what the business is doing and what customers expect. When this gap remains unaddressed, disruption occurs. \u201cThat\u2019s the essence of disruption: it\u2019s something that makes the consumer\u2019s life, or a technology that makes it possible for a consumer\u2019s life, to be meaningfully different,\u201d says Steve, \u201cand businesses that don\u2019t adapt to those new possibilities will eventually just become irrelevant to the consumers.\u201d Steve and Geoff call human behavior the subatomic layer of any business. They assert that every business outcome is because of human behavior. \u201cYou cannot change your performance review, you cannot grow, you cannot improve your margin unless someone somewhere changes their behavior,\u201d says Geoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But businesses cannot always respond to change in the same way that consumers do. While a consumer can risk a few dollars to try out a new service or product, large organizations are constrained by risk management measures. They cannot afford to take bold risks at the expense of the business. Steve and Geoff advise such businesses to embrace a culture of Minimum Viable Moves. This could be through the formation of an innovation lab or a corporate venture capital arm tasked with investing in startups. Steve adds that businesses must intuit what will be delightful to the customers that they are trying to serve and take every measure to deliver delightful experiences to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach of Deloitte are the coauthors of \u201cDetonate: Why - And How - Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices (and bring a beginner's mind) To Survive<\/a>,\u201d a book that seeks to expose defunct ways of thinking within organizations and help them innovate their way to the next level. In the book, the authors discuss how organizations develop poor corporate habits, which end up masquerading as best practices. They also offer alternative views on how organizations can embrace new ways of thinking and doing to win in the marketplace. Geoff and Steve recently joined us for a chat about their book and how they see the market evolving as digital transformation takes root across industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In previous industrial revolutions, growth was mostly linear, explains Geoff. Companies at that time had the opportunity to observe and assess technological advances and then integrate them once they matured. They did this without losing their competitive edge and without having to take any major risks. Today, the rate of change is no longer liner \u2013 it is exponential. While at the start of the information age, Moore\u2019s Law dictated the rate of change, today, as Steve says, \u201cthe impact really has to do with not just the technology itself, but it\u2019s all the technology upon the computing power which, in turn, changes how people behave and what\u2019s possible.\u201d The result of this \u201ctechnology stack\u201d is the combinations of those technologies accelerate the disruption to business models and the pace at which this disruption is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizations with playbooks and cultures optimized for linear growth will find themselves playing catch-up in the market if they do not adjust. Realizing that this exponential change is only starting to accelerate, organizations must embrace new orthodoxies and ways of thinking that allow them to experiment with new technologies and new approaches. One way to do this is by undertaking what Steve and Geoff call Minimum Viable Moves (MVMs). These are actions taken by an organization to test new ways of doing things without impacting the overall business. Borrowing from the phrase Minimum Viable Product popular in startup circles, focusing an organization on undertaking inexpensive and non-risky MVMs can help introduce new capabilities to an organization quickly and efficiently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most established organizations use financial projections to inform the strategic direction of the organization, or as Geoff puts it, they staple strategic planning processes to an annual financial forecast. This thinking creates a gap between what the business is doing and what customers expect. When this gap remains unaddressed, disruption occurs. \u201cThat\u2019s the essence of disruption: it\u2019s something that makes the consumer\u2019s life, or a technology that makes it possible for a consumer\u2019s life, to be meaningfully different,\u201d says Steve, \u201cand businesses that don\u2019t adapt to those new possibilities will eventually just become irrelevant to the consumers.\u201d Steve and Geoff call human behavior the subatomic layer of any business. They assert that every business outcome is because of human behavior. \u201cYou cannot change your performance review, you cannot grow, you cannot improve your margin unless someone somewhere changes their behavior,\u201d says Geoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But businesses cannot always respond to change in the same way that consumers do. While a consumer can risk a few dollars to try out a new service or product, large organizations are constrained by risk management measures. They cannot afford to take bold risks at the expense of the business. Steve and Geoff advise such businesses to embrace a culture of Minimum Viable Moves. This could be through the formation of an innovation lab or a corporate venture capital arm tasked with investing in startups. Steve adds that businesses must intuit what will be delightful to the customers that they are trying to serve and take every measure to deliver delightful experiences to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Orthodoxies, or otherwise known as conventional wisdom, refer to how things have always been done. In corporate talk, orthodoxies are often called best practice. While there are positive orthodoxies like human safety and regulations, there are those that limit an organization and indeed, individuals, from thinking \u201coutside the box.\u201d This conventional wisdom, over time, becomes integrated into corporate cultures and playbooks, creating barriers to new and innovative business models, processes and other transformative actions that could lead to greater growth, sustainability, defensibility, and profitability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach of Deloitte are the coauthors of \u201cDetonate: Why - And How - Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices (and bring a beginner's mind) To Survive<\/a>,\u201d a book that seeks to expose defunct ways of thinking within organizations and help them innovate their way to the next level. In the book, the authors discuss how organizations develop poor corporate habits, which end up masquerading as best practices. They also offer alternative views on how organizations can embrace new ways of thinking and doing to win in the marketplace. Geoff and Steve recently joined us for a chat about their book and how they see the market evolving as digital transformation takes root across industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In previous industrial revolutions, growth was mostly linear, explains Geoff. Companies at that time had the opportunity to observe and assess technological advances and then integrate them once they matured. They did this without losing their competitive edge and without having to take any major risks. Today, the rate of change is no longer liner \u2013 it is exponential. While at the start of the information age, Moore\u2019s Law dictated the rate of change, today, as Steve says, \u201cthe impact really has to do with not just the technology itself, but it\u2019s all the technology upon the computing power which, in turn, changes how people behave and what\u2019s possible.\u201d The result of this \u201ctechnology stack\u201d is the combinations of those technologies accelerate the disruption to business models and the pace at which this disruption is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizations with playbooks and cultures optimized for linear growth will find themselves playing catch-up in the market if they do not adjust. Realizing that this exponential change is only starting to accelerate, organizations must embrace new orthodoxies and ways of thinking that allow them to experiment with new technologies and new approaches. One way to do this is by undertaking what Steve and Geoff call Minimum Viable Moves (MVMs). These are actions taken by an organization to test new ways of doing things without impacting the overall business. Borrowing from the phrase Minimum Viable Product popular in startup circles, focusing an organization on undertaking inexpensive and non-risky MVMs can help introduce new capabilities to an organization quickly and efficiently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most established organizations use financial projections to inform the strategic direction of the organization, or as Geoff puts it, they staple strategic planning processes to an annual financial forecast. This thinking creates a gap between what the business is doing and what customers expect. When this gap remains unaddressed, disruption occurs. \u201cThat\u2019s the essence of disruption: it\u2019s something that makes the consumer\u2019s life, or a technology that makes it possible for a consumer\u2019s life, to be meaningfully different,\u201d says Steve, \u201cand businesses that don\u2019t adapt to those new possibilities will eventually just become irrelevant to the consumers.\u201d Steve and Geoff call human behavior the subatomic layer of any business. They assert that every business outcome is because of human behavior. \u201cYou cannot change your performance review, you cannot grow, you cannot improve your margin unless someone somewhere changes their behavior,\u201d says Geoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But businesses cannot always respond to change in the same way that consumers do. While a consumer can risk a few dollars to try out a new service or product, large organizations are constrained by risk management measures. They cannot afford to take bold risks at the expense of the business. Steve and Geoff advise such businesses to embrace a culture of Minimum Viable Moves. This could be through the formation of an innovation lab or a corporate venture capital arm tasked with investing in startups. Steve adds that businesses must intuit what will be delightful to the customers that they are trying to serve and take every measure to deliver delightful experiences to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geoff explains this dichotomy by quoting Suzuki\u2019s book Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind; \u201cIn a beginner\u2019s mind, there are many options. In an expert\u2019s mind, there are a few.\u201d This statement implies that most businesses develop an \u201cexpert\u201d way of looking at situations blocking out alternative, and in some cases, better ideas. To avoid this trap, organizations must approach each situation with an open mind, remaining willing to explore new ideas that may at times fly in the face of conventional wisdom. To illustrate this point, Steve and Geoff narrate how Deloitte US blew up conventional wisdom when determining whether to invest in a \u201cclick university\u201d or \u201cbrick university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deloitte US wanted to set up a university where they could train their people. Faced with a recession, the firm could have gone with conventional wisdom to leverage technology in a way where they could take cost out of their system. Instead, they decided to challenge this orthodoxy and build a brick university. \u201cIt\u2019s even more important in this world of technology and people not being face-to-face and being virtual to invest in something that can bring our firm together in a cultural way,\u201d explains Steve. This is an excellent example of how challenging conventional wisdom can result in an extraordinary outcome. While in this case, Deloitte US went in the opposite direction of digital transformation, they did so out of a clear understanding of what their company needed and ended up delivering a solution that brought the entire Deloitte fraternity together to learn and become collegial in an amazing facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBring a beginner\u2019s mind. Don\u2019t presume that what\u2019s happened in the past and the way things have been done in the past is the right way of doing things because if you try to bring past expertise to the table in a world of exponential change, you\u2019re probably going to get it wrong,\u201d cautions Geoff. However, he is quick to add that while organizations must challenge conventional wisdom, this does not mean throwing out everything. Instead, they must preserve the effective and profitable parts of their business while maintaining a portfolio of ongoing activities that attempt new things. Businesses that become adept at discovering new things, innovating quickly and working them into their core business, are the ones that will win in the 4th industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another area Balvinder believes has the potential to stimulate human-led innovation is incentives. By creating incentives that reward behaviors that support innovation, organizations can create a snowball effect that helps advance their innovation agenda at a faster rate. To achieve this, organizations must help their teams understand that they are part of a bigger picture. For instance, by helping employees understand why the organization must innovate (threats from new tech, new competitors, startups), it would be easier to foster a culture of innovation than if only top management understood the big picture. For instance, a traditional bank would need to make its employees aware of threats from digital-first banks like Revolut<\/a> and N26<\/a> to provide context to employees on why they need to embrace an innovation culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most organizations employ a technology-led innovation process, Balvinder sees human-led innovation as the path to lasting and disruptive innovation. He explains that human-led innovation is an approach that attempts to instill two competencies in teams. The first is business innovation, where team members are encouraged and taught how to develop the mind of an entrepreneur. The second competency has to do with behavioral fitness which touches on knowing yourself, how to lead others, emotional intelligence, things like influence and persuasion, how to deal with conflict. He stresses that these competencies can only be refined in a group environment where individual members receive multilateral feedback on their progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another area Balvinder believes has the potential to stimulate human-led innovation is incentives. By creating incentives that reward behaviors that support innovation, organizations can create a snowball effect that helps advance their innovation agenda at a faster rate. To achieve this, organizations must help their teams understand that they are part of a bigger picture. For instance, by helping employees understand why the organization must innovate (threats from new tech, new competitors, startups), it would be easier to foster a culture of innovation than if only top management understood the big picture. For instance, a traditional bank would need to make its employees aware of threats from digital-first banks like Revolut<\/a> and N26<\/a> to provide context to employees on why they need to embrace an innovation culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most organizations employ a technology-led innovation process, Balvinder sees human-led innovation as the path to lasting and disruptive innovation. He explains that human-led innovation is an approach that attempts to instill two competencies in teams. The first is business innovation, where team members are encouraged and taught how to develop the mind of an entrepreneur. The second competency has to do with behavioral fitness which touches on knowing yourself, how to lead others, emotional intelligence, things like influence and persuasion, how to deal with conflict. He stresses that these competencies can only be refined in a group environment where individual members receive multilateral feedback on their progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another area Balvinder believes has the potential to stimulate human-led innovation is incentives. By creating incentives that reward behaviors that support innovation, organizations can create a snowball effect that helps advance their innovation agenda at a faster rate. To achieve this, organizations must help their teams understand that they are part of a bigger picture. For instance, by helping employees understand why the organization must innovate (threats from new tech, new competitors, startups), it would be easier to foster a culture of innovation than if only top management understood the big picture. For instance, a traditional bank would need to make its employees aware of threats from digital-first banks like Revolut<\/a> and N26<\/a> to provide context to employees on why they need to embrace an innovation culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Balvinder believes this challenge can be overcome by organizations becoming more intentional about bringing teams together in physical spaces. He recommends that teams have face-to-face time together as this promotes better understanding, connections, and empathy among team members, important ingredients for an innovation culture to thrive. \u201cIf you want to create innovation, the quality of how you interact with others does become important,\u201d he says. This is exemplified, he argues, in the fact that a five-minute face-to-face meeting can accomplish more than a back and forth of 20 emails, a fact that science supports by showing that non-verbal communication (body language) accounts for 80% of human-to-human communications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most organizations employ a technology-led innovation process, Balvinder sees human-led innovation as the path to lasting and disruptive innovation. He explains that human-led innovation is an approach that attempts to instill two competencies in teams. The first is business innovation, where team members are encouraged and taught how to develop the mind of an entrepreneur. The second competency has to do with behavioral fitness which touches on knowing yourself, how to lead others, emotional intelligence, things like influence and persuasion, how to deal with conflict. He stresses that these competencies can only be refined in a group environment where individual members receive multilateral feedback on their progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another area Balvinder believes has the potential to stimulate human-led innovation is incentives. By creating incentives that reward behaviors that support innovation, organizations can create a snowball effect that helps advance their innovation agenda at a faster rate. To achieve this, organizations must help their teams understand that they are part of a bigger picture. For instance, by helping employees understand why the organization must innovate (threats from new tech, new competitors, startups), it would be easier to foster a culture of innovation than if only top management understood the big picture. For instance, a traditional bank would need to make its employees aware of threats from digital-first banks like Revolut<\/a> and N26<\/a> to provide context to employees on why they need to embrace an innovation culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the advent of AI and other high-tech technologies, interactions across both local and dispersed teams are increasingly becoming digitized, resulting in fewer face-to-face interactions among team members. \u201cWe are getting into a world that is high-tech and high-touch,\u201d says Balvinder. Today teams are faced with increasingly high-tech interactions while at the same time, a rising need to maintain direct communications in order to accelerate collaboration and innovation. This dilemma is accentuated by the influx of millennials into the workforce, a demographic that lives in a very mixed, hybrid world. This influx may at times clash with an older generation in senior management that is used to more direct communication that does not depend on technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Balvinder believes this challenge can be overcome by organizations becoming more intentional about bringing teams together in physical spaces. He recommends that teams have face-to-face time together as this promotes better understanding, connections, and empathy among team members, important ingredients for an innovation culture to thrive. \u201cIf you want to create innovation, the quality of how you interact with others does become important,\u201d he says. This is exemplified, he argues, in the fact that a five-minute face-to-face meeting can accomplish more than a back and forth of 20 emails, a fact that science supports by showing that non-verbal communication (body language) accounts for 80% of human-to-human communications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most organizations employ a technology-led innovation process, Balvinder sees human-led innovation as the path to lasting and disruptive innovation. He explains that human-led innovation is an approach that attempts to instill two competencies in teams. The first is business innovation, where team members are encouraged and taught how to develop the mind of an entrepreneur. The second competency has to do with behavioral fitness which touches on knowing yourself, how to lead others, emotional intelligence, things like influence and persuasion, how to deal with conflict. He stresses that these competencies can only be refined in a group environment where individual members receive multilateral feedback on their progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another area Balvinder believes has the potential to stimulate human-led innovation is incentives. By creating incentives that reward behaviors that support innovation, organizations can create a snowball effect that helps advance their innovation agenda at a faster rate. To achieve this, organizations must help their teams understand that they are part of a bigger picture. For instance, by helping employees understand why the organization must innovate (threats from new tech, new competitors, startups), it would be easier to foster a culture of innovation than if only top management understood the big picture. For instance, a traditional bank would need to make its employees aware of threats from digital-first banks like Revolut<\/a> and N26<\/a> to provide context to employees on why they need to embrace an innovation culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the advent of AI and other high-tech technologies, interactions across both local and dispersed teams are increasingly becoming digitized, resulting in fewer face-to-face interactions among team members. \u201cWe are getting into a world that is high-tech and high-touch,\u201d says Balvinder. Today teams are faced with increasingly high-tech interactions while at the same time, a rising need to maintain direct communications in order to accelerate collaboration and innovation. This dilemma is accentuated by the influx of millennials into the workforce, a demographic that lives in a very mixed, hybrid world. This influx may at times clash with an older generation in senior management that is used to more direct communication that does not depend on technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Balvinder believes this challenge can be overcome by organizations becoming more intentional about bringing teams together in physical spaces. He recommends that teams have face-to-face time together as this promotes better understanding, connections, and empathy among team members, important ingredients for an innovation culture to thrive. \u201cIf you want to create innovation, the quality of how you interact with others does become important,\u201d he says. This is exemplified, he argues, in the fact that a five-minute face-to-face meeting can accomplish more than a back and forth of 20 emails, a fact that science supports by showing that non-verbal communication (body language) accounts for 80% of human-to-human communications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most organizations employ a technology-led innovation process, Balvinder sees human-led innovation as the path to lasting and disruptive innovation. He explains that human-led innovation is an approach that attempts to instill two competencies in teams. The first is business innovation, where team members are encouraged and taught how to develop the mind of an entrepreneur. The second competency has to do with behavioral fitness which touches on knowing yourself, how to lead others, emotional intelligence, things like influence and persuasion, how to deal with conflict. He stresses that these competencies can only be refined in a group environment where individual members receive multilateral feedback on their progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another area Balvinder believes has the potential to stimulate human-led innovation is incentives. By creating incentives that reward behaviors that support innovation, organizations can create a snowball effect that helps advance their innovation agenda at a faster rate. To achieve this, organizations must help their teams understand that they are part of a bigger picture. For instance, by helping employees understand why the organization must innovate (threats from new tech, new competitors, startups), it would be easier to foster a culture of innovation than if only top management understood the big picture. For instance, a traditional bank would need to make its employees aware of threats from digital-first banks like Revolut<\/a> and N26<\/a> to provide context to employees on why they need to embrace an innovation culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Diversity can also refer to the difference between older and younger generation workers in an organization. Balvinder offers an illustration of a 50-something CFO at a traditional bank, who, representing an older generation of more traditional workers, must work, at the same level, with a C-suite cybersecurity executive who may be in his\/her thirties. Having to manage at the same level on the organogram, synergizing these two individuals can lead to incredible results. \u201cWe talk about many layers of diversity. If we can understand them and put them together in the right way, then magic happens, but the first thing we must be is aware,\u201d says Balvinder. This awareness has to do with learning how to blend high-tech with high-touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the advent of AI and other high-tech technologies, interactions across both local and dispersed teams are increasingly becoming digitized, resulting in fewer face-to-face interactions among team members. \u201cWe are getting into a world that is high-tech and high-touch,\u201d says Balvinder. Today teams are faced with increasingly high-tech interactions while at the same time, a rising need to maintain direct communications in order to accelerate collaboration and innovation. This dilemma is accentuated by the influx of millennials into the workforce, a demographic that lives in a very mixed, hybrid world. This influx may at times clash with an older generation in senior management that is used to more direct communication that does not depend on technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Balvinder believes this challenge can be overcome by organizations becoming more intentional about bringing teams together in physical spaces. He recommends that teams have face-to-face time together as this promotes better understanding, connections, and empathy among team members, important ingredients for an innovation culture to thrive. \u201cIf you want to create innovation, the quality of how you interact with others does become important,\u201d he says. This is exemplified, he argues, in the fact that a five-minute face-to-face meeting can accomplish more than a back and forth of 20 emails, a fact that science supports by showing that non-verbal communication (body language) accounts for 80% of human-to-human communications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most organizations employ a technology-led innovation process, Balvinder sees human-led innovation as the path to lasting and disruptive innovation. He explains that human-led innovation is an approach that attempts to instill two competencies in teams. The first is business innovation, where team members are encouraged and taught how to develop the mind of an entrepreneur. The second competency has to do with behavioral fitness which touches on knowing yourself, how to lead others, emotional intelligence, things like influence and persuasion, how to deal with conflict. He stresses that these competencies can only be refined in a group environment where individual members receive multilateral feedback on their progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another area Balvinder believes has the potential to stimulate human-led innovation is incentives. By creating incentives that reward behaviors that support innovation, organizations can create a snowball effect that helps advance their innovation agenda at a faster rate. To achieve this, organizations must help their teams understand that they are part of a bigger picture. For instance, by helping employees understand why the organization must innovate (threats from new tech, new competitors, startups), it would be easier to foster a culture of innovation than if only top management understood the big picture. For instance, a traditional bank would need to make its employees aware of threats from digital-first banks like Revolut<\/a> and N26<\/a> to provide context to employees on why they need to embrace an innovation culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massive companies like Apple and Amazon have built profitable businesses on triggering emotions through experiences. Balvinder sees this as a pointer to how organizations should approach innovation. \u201cNot everything is application; it\u2019s also about the experience,\u201d he says. By creating memorable experiences, both for employees and customers, organizations can help trigger an emotional response, a key component of the human decision-making process. By doing so, organizations can create innovation cultures that do not hinge on cleverly written memos but instead emanate from the hearts of employees, a crucial factor in the race to becoming successful in a digital-first human-centric marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\nConclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Organizational View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Organizational View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Organizational View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Strategic View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Organizational View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Strategic View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Organizational View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Strategic View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Organizational View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Innovation View<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Management Optimization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Resource Utilization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Data-Driven Business Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Full Interview With Gregory LaBlanc<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Customer Behavior vs. Internal Forecasts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Customer Behavior vs. Internal Forecasts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Customer Behavior vs. Internal Forecasts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Exponential Growth vs. Linear Growth<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Customer Behavior vs. Internal Forecasts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Exponential Growth vs. Linear Growth<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Customer Behavior vs. Internal Forecasts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Exponential Growth vs. Linear Growth<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Customer Behavior vs. Internal Forecasts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Beginner Mind vs. Expert Mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Anticipating Exponential Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview With Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Building an Experiential Innovation Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Building an Experiential Innovation Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Building an Experiential Innovation Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Human-led Innovation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Building an Experiential Innovation Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Human-led Innovation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Building an Experiential Innovation Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Human-led Innovation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Building an Experiential Innovation Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Blending High-tech with High-touch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Human-led Innovation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Building an Experiential Innovation Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\n
Latest
Blending High-tech with High-touch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Human-led Innovation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Building an Experiential Innovation Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIDEO: Interview with Balvinder Singh Powar<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Latest
