Category Archives: Leadership

Getting your enterprise ready – bringing your employees along and next steps

In the last of these articles I want to focus on what is often overlooked, in any change – bringing along employees. We can have the best digital software platform in the world, the best partnerships and the best services but change takes longer to achieve and is harder to sustain without employees believing in the evolution and benefitting from the shift. They have to see what is in it for them, what is in it for the organization and what is in it for society.

James Surowiecki, a New York Times journalist and author of books such as Wisdom of Crowds, once said “The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses”. This quote illustrates the opportunity available today if we can get the employees integrated and collaborating on the changes and highlights the risk if we cannot.

Change, however, can evoke hesitation in employees. Let’s think about what to consider as we go through change and how it can be transformed into something more positive:

  • Know that change is a process. It does not happen from one day to the next. It is important to have a plan that explains where you are going and the steps you think will be needed to get there. It is important employees understand the principles involved and that progress is transparently communicated on an ongoing basis. They also need to understand their role in the plan and how it will benefit them and society. There is nothing better than a shared vision to drive a plan forwards to a successful outcome.
  • Help your employees reframe how they view change. Change can be positive yet it is often perceived as negative. For most employees the fourth industrial revolution presents a fantastic opportunity to grow, learn and be ready for the next generation of challenges our workforce needs to overcome!
  • Be open to listen and change course. The world is shifting around us and a change process and plan started today might need adapting tomorrow. It is vital that employees understand that you are not on a rigid path but one that will likely need to adapt. This will prepare the ground for inevitable variations along the way.

So what is this change we speak about? Every company is on a journey to being a software company delivering services with IoT, the cloud, big data and analytics at the core. We are shifting into a knowledge economy which requires individuals, organizations and governments to learn how to best leverage data, the cloud, analytics, programming and more to drive more educated decisions, differentiated services and market approaches.

For employees this offers a chance to obtain new skills, work in new fields and to push the boundaries of creativity on a continuous basis. For those not yet in the workforce, it provides an opportunity to obtain new in demand skills. There is no doubt this fourth industrial revolution will generate new jobs and open a new world of opportunities. This is not about removing jobs but making them more impactful.

It is therefore vitally important that we are all ensuring governments and organizations are providing the right learning opportunities to obtain and enhance skills so everyone can prosper in the knowledge economy. This means we need to provide access to the right environments to experiment and ensure that new ways of working, where speed is of the essence, are able to take hold along with a data driven mindset.

Learning and Skills Development

At Microsoft, as we strive to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, we know that there is tangible assistance we can provide. We understand the need to help prepare the younger generation for the future which is why we teamed up with others to provide the BBC Microbit to 1 Million students in the UK (amongst many other initiatives). We understand it’s important to facilitate skills development, which is why we enacted the professional degree program, run hackathons, provide online training and deliver free trials. These kinds of activities can help remove barriers and drive new opportunities which in turn reduced hesitation around the changes we are undergoing.

Adopting new approaches

If we accept the future will be largely software-based, we should also accept the way in which we build and deliver things will change. Moving forwards organizations have the opportunity to be faster to market, evolve products once in market and enable new services even in shipped products.

This is going to require organizations to adapt R&D approaches to work towards a minimum viable product which can be shipped quickly. That quickly shipped product is then continuously improved over time and new services created around it using data it is generating. Customers may not even know they needed these services at the time of purchase, but such changes enable new monetization and societal improvement opportunities on an ongoing basis.

Next Steps

In short – work with your employees to learn new technologies and explore possibilities. Ensure our younger generations are ready for the next generation of jobs and, lastly, transform your organization so you can continuously evolve products and services over time.

Today much of the hype around IoT focuses on the products and services. I believe the emphasis should be on adapting to the new world and how organizations are using IoT to ride the wave of the fourth industrial revolution to the benefit of all.  I believe the time has come to take all that an organization or government does and bring it together to deliver rich products and services that solve problems and improve society using the technology that is available.

A focus on digital transformation is part of the role of every government official and every organization employee. The shift to the cloud, data driven organizations, analytics and IoT driven services is no longer on the horizon. It is already here.

Our next moves set the tone for how our society, industries, organizations and governments will look for the foreseeable future. 

How long will you wait before you start your journey?

10 tips for first time corporate bloggers

stamp-895385_1920Social Media. It can be a daunting world to the newbie.  Fear abounds as people consider if they should engage or not. This fear is significantly intensified if the engagement is in a corporate context where people worry a mistyped line can result in the elimination of their job.

The fact is that today most people should be engaged in Social Media with guidelines helping them understand the rules of engagements to avoid getting themselves into a tough situation. Most organizations have now established social media guidelines/policies but that is where the help often stops. It feels like the aim is to control rather than encourage.

Different Social Engagement ZonesThis is why, back in August, I wrote this post focused on “How to get your most valuable resources engaged in social media“.  That post shared a framework through which a person can move as they go on their social media journey. It can be adopted by an organization and used by individuals to determine where they are comfortable on the platform.

The framework covers being a content sharer via Twitter and LinkedIn. As a result I shared a post containing “15 points for the twitter beginner” which reflects the advice I gave to people stepping out into the world of Twitter for the first time as a content sharer.

In this post I move beyond being a content sharer to the broader content creator space. I focus on the 10 tips for first time bloggers which I shared with people as they went on their journey towards being socially engaged. Nowadays this applies to the LinkedIn publishing platform, corporate blogs and personal blogs.

All of these posts have been part of a series that shared my experience as I tried to get people to be socially engaged in this modern world of social media and social selling. Getting people socially engaged in your organization will drive great benefits and great knowledge sharing.

I am very interested to know if you have other hints and tips so please feel free to share them in the comments.

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Enterprise Feedback Management – Your Next Competitive Edge?

I come from a world of Analytics and Business Intelligence. A world where we mostly take transactional information generated by various operational systems, and more recently sensors, such that we can try to understand the past, predict the future and then take actions where necessary to affect the future outcome.

What etcIn that world we try to understand and predict, through analytics, things such as which employees are likely to leave next, understand which customers are likely to churn as they undertake their journey with the company and understand which customers are likely to abandon their shopping cart. In all these cases we are trying to spot things early such that we can take proactive action to prevent the predicted outcome occurring, where it makes sense to intervene, through the use of analytics.

There is no doubt that Analytics can help you understand what is likely to happen next, and who it might affect, such that you can take proactive action. One question often still remains and that is WHY? The Why is important as it lets you attack issues at the source not just be focused on dealing with the symptom.

  1. Why is it that a customer is thinking to churn or has churned?
  2. Why is it that an employee is thinking to leave or has left?
  3. Why is it that a customer decides to abandon their shopping cart or abandoned it?
  4. Why is it that one part of a process seems to run slowly no matter how you optimize it?

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Safe Harbor – Personal Data Of EU Citizens Not Safe In The USA?

Safe HarborSafe Harbor is no more. Well Safe Harbor still exists but following a ruling in the European Court of Justice it has now been ruled as an invalid mechanism to protect the data and privacy of European Union citizens personal data when it is moved to the USA from the EU. In essence this is a damning statement that says European Citizen personal data was never safe from certain parties in the USA.

TThis is down to the fact that the US government is perceived as having used that transmitted data to spy on citizens (as alleged by Edward Snowdon). There is no suggestion of bad behaviour by US organizations themselves who generally offer much better protection than many companies could develop and maintain themselves.

Exactly what this means is still being worked on. I suspect it will mean a lot of scrambling and head scratching for the many organizations (estimated at about 4500) who use Safe Harbor. Those organizations use it to enable them to run a centralized internal IT platform which supports their entire global operations, to offer centralized platforms for consumers hosted and run totally out of the US and for companies who move data around as part of their general business approach.

This week I had a number of non-IT friends ask me what this was all about. Mainly these questions are coming as the ruling is making news headlines around Europe. This post is a summary of what I tried to explain to them. Safe Harbor is something most people never knew existed in the first place and it is amazing it has taken over our televisions.

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Are annual performance reviews a crutch for a bad manager?

feedback-796142_1280Annual Performance Reviews seem to be on the way out! The internet is awash with stories of organizations stopping the execution of Annual Peformance reviews. Deloitte, Accenture, National Australia Bank, GE and more have all come out publicly to say they are doing away with them.

As someone who has managed people, for more than 15 years, I think this is a welcome move. I believe annual performance reviews are a crutch for a bad manager that really only provides marginal benefits to managing and leading a team unless there is really no other feedback happening. In addition they mostly fail in reaching its primary aim which is to help team members excel over time by providing them with feedback.

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