Overview: Digital Transformation

“Bitcoin offers the prospect of necessary and important disruption in finance for the benefit of buyers and sellers rather than financiers and middlemen.” - U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers "... bitcoin’s potential lies more as a low-profile, back-office phenomenon than as mainstream medium of exchange" - Interest in Bitcoin Grows on …

"With mar­keters becom­ing increas­ingly more expe­ri­enced in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, we often find our­selves at the epi­cen­ter of enter­prise transformation — leading the way across our respec­tive organ­i­sa­tions to cham­pion customer-centric think­ing; to effec­tively mas­ter chal­lenges such as mobile and cross-channel mar­ket­ing; and to h…

"While traditional strategy calls for rigorous analysis and critical thinking, design thinking espouses ‘thinking by doing’. The key is to find the sweet spot between the two approaches." Nice exploration of overthinking vs. underthinking: "... overthinking — aka ‘death by analysis’. An obsession with minimizing risk leads to the inability to ma…

"There has been a strong increase in the proportion of workers that are disengaged in the past five years, perhaps doubling ... the costs of this disengagement can be very high... remote workers - those that work somewhere other than where their boss works - are more engaged.... when workers are remote, the leader's behaviors change, and that .…

" the 3D Workforce: Distributed, Decentralized, and Discontinuous... is really a 4D workforce, however, because these is a fourth factor: Disengagement." Good overview of some recent research, with some conclusions such as: "...as companies become more fast and loose with the transition to social business models of operations, employee engag…

"digital transformation... the application (or reapplication) of digital technologies and the restructuring of operations to better engage with customers, the company ecosystem, and the greater marketplace... We have rocketed into a new economy - a new era - where much of what we knew and relied upon ten years ago is being superseded by new ins…

"most digital transformation deployments fall into the 'deploy and pray' category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. ... paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

"today’s social collaboration tools ... are focused on the wrong things, or at least on the wrong scale.... enterprises do business, but people do work. We will see a shift away from tools designed around ‘business’ and instead see a swing to tools that help people accomplish their work... the mantra will be — people first, mobile first, cloud f…

"Companies on Fortune’s “100 best companies to work for” list returned 14%/year on their stock compared to 6% for the average company... The Workplace Fund ... investing only in companies that have outstanding workplaces. It’s had a 9.63% return since its inception in April 2005, compared with the S&P 5.58% over the same period... Gallup resea…

"to have technologies that work for all of us, we need to ensure that those who build and distribute those technologies have insights from a wide and diverse range of experiences... We all have a filter bubble, and if you try your best to listen to a diverse range of people, you might be able to pop it somewhat." - If software is eating the worl…

"Dogfooding is the golden rule of platforms. And currently, open government portals are flagrantly violating this golden rule... I can’t find a single example of a government entity consuming the data they publish... For the most part, inter-agency data sharing doesn’t happen ...when it does, the agencies set up non-public back channels to push a…

"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…