Overview: Digital Transformation

"When you have a job, it’s amazing how many startup ideas you come up with... I’m sure my list of ideas contains a few that could be much bigger than ReadMe. However, the point isn’t to find the idea with the biggest market size. It’s to find the right idea for you... I spent too much time waiting for other people. Investors, cofounders, mentors.…

"the distributed Internet was dropped into an economy that has concentrated power structures with asymmetrical ability to shape it for their own purposes. Whether the old financial services behemoths, the new titans of silicon valley, or the vast government bureaucracies that mine the digital world to monitor their citizens, the dream of a new age…

"Much of what social collaboration tools are designed to support is shallow work, and the stuff of managerial oversight... deep productivity comes from supporting deep work - cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve - trying to support…

"On January 17, 2014, President Obama spoke at the Justice Department about changes in the technology that we use for national security purposes, and what these technologies mean for our privacy broadly. He called on the administration to conduct a broad 90-day review of big data and privacy: how these technologies affect the way we live and the w…

"Unfortunately, too many managers don't adequately follow through and thereby squander the important time they've invested in coaching. You can make the process more effective by adopting these practices after every session." - Your Coaching Is Only as Good as Your Follow-Up Skills - HBR

"Startups are notorious for this: You’ll have two or three people who are true hustlers, wearing multiple hats, pushing themselves and others to get shit done, while the rest of the group sort of ‘tags along’ and waits for shit to happen. " - The Truth About Collaboration — Medium

An excellent tour of management structures from hierarchy to holacracy, with some criticisms of the latter: "Hierarchies do authority incredibly well... but have some big flaws. They become slow, with decisions taking an eternity to pass up and down the ranks. Innovation from the edges is stifled by top-down control and bureaucracy.... So in the…

A great riposte to Joe Keohane’s "In Praise of Meaningless Work", which descried "meaning-mongering as the new greenwashing". "The problem isn’t that corporate leaders are talking about meaning too much. It’s that they aren’t taking it seriously enough.... It should come as no surprise that the corporate machines that are populated by such inter…

"The future of work is screwed. It's being built upon a foundation of legacy thinking and outdated value systems. Instead, the future of work should start with a reboot in company culture and employee engagement." The 10 reasons are both cutting and funny and worth a read. To dig deeper, there's even a free report, summarised in text & video. K…

"Newsrooms don't need large budgets for analyzing data--they can easily access basic data tools that are free or inexpensive." - Drilling Down: A Quick Guide to Free and Inexpensive Data Tools | Global Investigative Journalism Network

A lot of good practical advice here, although focused on teams distributed across the planet, not just Europe. The last recommendation is worth remembering: "Last, but not least... meet as a whole team. Do social things together, give people a chance to get to know one another. Once you connected a real human with the flat, blurry face on the scr…

A glimpse into tomorrow's ultra-personalised web, when these technologies migrate out of marketing into CMS ... "an engine to generate custom sets of tags for each Web site visitor.... the next step is to assemble the tag data into detailed individual profiles for personalization, testing, attribution, and other purposes... These features go bey…

"There is no shortage of stories about companies that create amazing innovations with digital technology ... the software, media and technology industries ... account for less than 10% of the U.S. economy. What about the other 90%? We studied more than 400 large companies ... in every industry, companies are doing exciting things with digital te…

"I’ve seen many successful startups emerge and flourish outside of Silicon Valley, like Hootsuite, Jive, Bazaarvoice, Omniture, Spredfast, Sprinklr, BuddyMedia, BlaBlaCar, Freelancer, and a plethora of Chinese tech companies ... let’s first break down the pros and cons of having your startup be in Silicon Valley" - Your Tech Startup Doesn’t Nee…

"an engine to generate custom sets of tags for each Web site visitor.... the next step is to assemble the tag data into detailed individual profiles for personalization, testing, attribution, and other purposes... These features go beyond Web page tags to capture data from mobile apps, from ad pixels served on external Web sites, and from other s…

"we wanted an easy way to create and share social cards with our readers... Vox Media’s ‘meme’, an open source social card making tool. A few hours of tinkering later, and we had our own version set up with some simple functionality, along with a new name: CardKit.... a simple and easy to use tool for everyone to quickly and dynamically create im…

"Who says innovation is only for start-ups? In these interviews, the heads of three large, established companies—Intuit, Idealab, and Autodesk— argue there’s no reason big players can’t develop the next big thing... how it can remove roadblocks to experimentation, and the merits of creating its very own idea incubators. "one thing that’s made the…

"When you think about a company with no managers there’s a good chance your mind drifts to stories of chaotic “meritocracies”, bro-y cultures, and HR disasters. Whereas we value mentorship and coaching, continuous self-improvement, and strive to make sure everyone feels safe and supported. ... That said, we do think there are problems with tradit…

"Advancement in digital technologies has disrupted everything, including leadership styles ... Employees want more ownership rather than to follow instruction; customers want to participate in the marketing and development process; and leaders are finding that open and agile organizations are able to maneuver more effectively ..." Not just platit…

Even if you're not in the slightest bit interested in bitcoin or blockchains, you should read this, as it first explains why the Internet enabled innovation through "the abstraction of a separate “application layer.” Core Internet protocols - the “transport layer” - shuffle packets of data around, but they don’t define how the exchange of packets …

"While we've always loved a good chart and map at Vox, appreciating a chart or map does not data journalism make. Data journalism is not just data visualization... ... the explosion in data sources readily available on the web... can both aid in telling important and necessary stories, but can also be easily misunderstood and potentially manipula…

Some useful ideas for what we call the 'Project Briefing' stage, which may be the first part, or indeed the entirety, of a project's Inception phase: "... we often discussed visual or technical issues without a clear understanding of the business goals... we immediately jumped to design suggestions that were based on personal opinion, assumption …

"This paper shares ‘how’ to bring an Enterprise Gamification approach to your organization, building on ‘what’ is Enterprise Gamification, outlined in our earlier paper, ‘Let the games begin: Using game techniques to drive digital transformation’, and demonstrates the tangible benefits of gamification technique to empower employees" - Enterprise …

"In How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg... focus on hiring, developing and empowering "smart creatives"-professionals with the technical skills to solve problems as well as the imagination to dream up new ideas. ... while senior executives strategize and plan, those plans always fall short. "Since the plan is wrong, the peopl…

"banks and bank regulators don't seem to be aware of how much danger they're in, or how fast tech is moving to destroy traditional financial services" - TransferWise, Mark Carney, And 'Uber-Type Situation' In Banking - Business Insider

"Get ready for companies that run themselves. But will the autonomous economy set us all free, or just make the rich richer?" Good intro, setting companies like etherum into a wider context and using a hypothetical example to show how a DAO could emerge and propagate. And then it sets alarm bells ringing. "the true economic significance of autom…

Over on Medium, a terrific piece taking apart how bad most hiring processes are, and exploring one experiment with fixing it: hiring hackathons. The actual results were mixed - it was a pilot, after all - but the idea definitely deserves traction for a company like Intrasoft."

Of them all, I particularly like the look of Write Or Die, Wridea & StayFocused, which possibly says more about me than my 5 latest blog posts combined: "These tools will not only provide you with a way to write down your ideas whenever they hit you, but will also enable you to organize your time better and start writing more content through a re…

"decision makers get stuck in a memory loop and can only predict the future as a reflection of the past... A way around... is a speed-dating version of scenario planning, one that takes hours rather than months... get participants out of their usual frame of reference, opening their eyes to a possible future that would require very different type…

This one's a mustread, helping you identify and understand all four 'Dark Tetrad' personality types (everyday sadists, narcissists, Machiavellians & psychopaths). Useful not just for navigating your own organisation, but also that of your client ... "Blessed with a surfeit of confidence and knack for lying, they dazzle in interviews, make great…